TBPN Live - Peter Thiel Gets Apocalyptic, The Myth of AI Millions, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Joe Lonsdale, Bret Taylor, Riley Walz

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

(00:11) - Peter Thiel Gets Apocalyptic (13:55) - The Myth of AI Millions (49:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (54:34) - Bret Taylor, co-founder of Sierra and chairman of OpenAI's board, discusses how Sierra's AI agents are transforming customer service by autonomously handling tasks like answering calls and managing complex processes, thereby reducing costs and enhancing customer experiences. He emphasizes the importance of aligning AI solutions with business outcomes, advocating for outcome-based pricing models where clients pay for successfully completed tasks, ensuring that Sierra's services directly contribute to measurable business improvements. Taylor also highlights the challenges incumbent software companies face in adapting to AI advancements, noting that transitioning both technology and business models is complex, and that startups like Sierra have the advantage of agility and focus in this rapidly evolving landscape. (01:31:07) - Joe Lonsdale is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, known for co-founding Palantir Technologies and serving as managing partner at 8VC. In the conversation, he discusses the rapid growth and high valuations in the AI sector, emphasizing the importance of investing in top talent and innovative ideas. He also highlights the potential of AI to transform various industries, including healthcare and construction, and shares insights on the evolving startup landscape in Texas. (01:59:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:07:16) - Jim Cramer's Daily Ritual (02:11:50) - VCs Scramble For AI Darlings (02:22:27) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:26:59) - Riley Walz, a 23-year-old software engineer, discusses his creation of "Find My Parking Cops," an app that used publicly available data to track San Francisco parking enforcement officers in real time, allowing users to see their locations and ticketing activity. He explains how he identified predictable patterns in ticket ID numbers to scrape this data, leading to the app's rapid viral success. However, within four hours of its launch, the city altered its website to block data access, effectively disabling the app. (02:43:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're a Washington TVPN. Today is Wednesday, September 24th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. The Wall Street Journal has a post because they wrote an article about Peter Thiel's lecture circuit on the Antichrist. They write Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor in data, AI, defense, and weapons development technologies wants everyone to think more about the end of the world.

And it got me thinking more about capital allocation, honestly. This circuit, we've covered this a little bit. Teal has been on a lecture series that's now four parts up in San Francisco. Tyler, do you know why Peter is doing this? What do you mean? Do you know why he's doing this lecture circuit? You're supposed to say why questions are overdetermined. Oh, yeah.

That was a layup. That was a layup. There's always why questions are overdetermined. Tyler made this. anyway never ask why ask how to save time and money go to ramp dot com easy use corporate cards bill payment accounting a whole lot more all in one place um they are not live streaming this they should be live streaming it on re stream one live stream 30 plus destinations multi stream reach your audience wherever they are no it is off the record and if you go and you get a ticket and you post about it

you get axed yeah somebody summarized the first couple and just immediately got a comment from Stevens, who said, you're banned. Yeah, they were running the Blake Masters. They were trying to run back the Blake Masters playbook. So if you're not familiar with the lore here back in spring of 2012. He was basically kind of making a run it. I want to be the Blake Masters of the Antichrist. Yeah, which is like a wild, wild thing to play out because, I mean, so let's give a little

history here. Back in spring 2012. He wanted his name in the history books next to the section on the anti-crack. Yeah, exactly, which is very different than what happened last. time Peter gave a set of lectures. It was at Stanford, and it became the backbone of the best-selling book, zero to one. The talks were focused on entrepreneurship, but it could be seen as a history lesson or political treaties or referendum on American culture. There was a lot that came into that lecture series, and there's a lot of facts in that book, a lot of stories in that

book that aren't strictly directly applicable to just building a company, even though the course was literally called How to Start a Startup, CS-183. And zero to one kind of turned into the playbook that Founders Fund ran for a long time and still runs and has produced a bunch of alpha. The ideas of being founder friendly, the monopoly thesis, the definite optimist. Like these tealisms became real investment strategies for the following decade and are still holding true today. It was a bit shocking. It was always shocking to me that like the be founder friendly, don't fire founders, like stuck around as durable alpha for as long as it did. but VCs just love firing founders.

Like, it's just nothing. Sometimes they can't help them. Yeah, I've never done it personally, but I imagine. You've always wanted to. I imagine the thrill must be electric because even though... You're ripping somebody from their creation. It must be, because it clearly doesn't produce alpha. Because if you look at the companies that are founder-led, they tend to outperform.

So you're sacrificing a lot of financial gain when you fire a founder, but the rush. The rush must be incredible. It must be better than even. returning billions of dollars to your LPs. But, so this new lecture circuit is about the Antichrist, and the series doesn't fit neatly into the previous Stanford course calendar.

It's not listed as CS-184, Antichrist. No, it's not a computer science course at Stanford. It's being put on by Michelle Stevens at Acts 17 and is much more focused on religion, specifically in Christianity. So the Wall Street Journal characterized one of Teal's course, this way. Teal draws on a theory that the Antichrist could be an individual or entity that is incredibly charismatic, but talks repeatedly about the end of the world, thereby convincing

society to give it the power it needs to regulate the existential risks from science and technology. And there are lots of people that come to mind when you think about talking about Dumerism. And Teal cites Greta Thunberg. She said, our house is on fire. We must act like the house is on fire. she said also we are in the beginning of a mass extinction this is in September of 2019

and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth she told this too I think is reported by PBS at the UN Climate Action Summit

she's been very focused in climate her campaign to increase human suffering it's been a mixed bag but Eliezer Utikowski said other Dumer

things he has a new book out he's on a book tour he says if we go ahead on this, everyone will die. He's referring to AI, not climate change in this case, including children who did not choose this and do not do anything wrong. Sam Altman has also said some stuff that's sort of apocalyptic.

You know, he told the U.S. Senate in his testimony in 2023. If I don't get $200 trillion. If I can't, if I can't automate enterprise workflows. If I can't get $500 trillion million, $1,000, $9,99,99. I need $9,99, $9,000, $9,000, $1,000,000, $1,000,000, $1,000, $9,000,000, $9,000, $9,000, $9,000, $9,000, please. Yes. Don't make me choose. But make me choose.

Don't make me choose between curing cancer and free education. Don't make me choose between saving time and saving money. Save both. We can save both with rave. Anyway, no, but he did give, you know, a bit of a doomer take. He was talking about how this could go wrong. He said, if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. Elon Musk also said something similar.

He said, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. And the original SpaceX thesis was... What did he say that, by the way? He said that in October of 2014 at the MIT Centennial Symposium. And what did he mean by that? Because now he's got a X-A-I. He's summoning a demon. I think he thinks that if you shape the demon portal in the right shape the demon comes through

and it's kind of friendly maybe? Friendly demon. Kind of nice. I don't know. Friendly demon that increases enterprise value through business automation and increase efficiency. Hopefully. And vibe coding 3JS apps. That's the demon that I want.

But even SpaceX, you can view as a rebuttal to the apocalypse. What would be apocalyptic, humanity remaining on the earth alone, an asteroid comes, hits the earth, we're all done. But if we become multi-planetary, we are no longer a single point of failure. If there's humans on Mars and the moon and Earth, if something bad happens to Earth, humanity continues. The stakes that Elon framed SpaceX in were world consequential. By the way, if you go to xAI.com, it's this random company. called Unk AI, U-N-K-A-I. And they feature popular AI brands like Rock 4, ChatGPT, Deepseek, and Xiaomi, and Unitree.

Weird. Seemingly a Chinese company. Okay. Odd. That's using it to promote a range of products. Yeah. Anyways, very strange. So my question was, there's a lot of focus on if you speak in millinery and terms, if you speak

of apocalyptic consequences to not building your technology. You might be the Antichrist. It might be bad. But at the same time, I'm just looking at history here and looking at these folks who have become popular and thought leaders on apocalyptic scenarios, Elon, Sam, Utikowski, Greta. If you backed these folks as a basket, you would have done quite well. You're in SpaceX. you're in open AI. You've done quite well. And I'm wondering where the line is for, you know, using, speaking about apocalyptic consequences to the lack of technology,

to the lack of not solving a problem, and then balancing that with delivering something that isn't authoritarian, but is actually just a really, really big ambitious project. So if you read into, you know, we're summoning the demon, we need to go to Mars because humanity could be, wiped out on Earth is cooked, right? There's one world where it's like, that is apocalyptic thinking.

There's another which is just like, this is a reframing on the classic, like, I want to save the world, I want to change the world, we want to make the world a better place. All those terms have kind of fallen out of fashion as a lot of founders just kind of wound up, you know, building, automating manual workflows, right?

And so they stopped saying we're going to change the world with a better database. But there's still something, if you're a VC, and you want to back a moon shot and you want to back something that's either going to be a zero or a trillion dollars

that where I feel like your year should perk up. Augustus is a great example of this pitch because everyday people experience rain all the time. They're not necessarily like droughts or not something super tangible

right because you just you turn the faucet and the water runs regardless of if you're in a drought or not. Obviously farmers feel this much more intensely but he's come out and said, said, you know, we need to be able to control the weather. We need to be able to increase precipitation. And you should fund me so that I can do this, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's something about these bold missions that rally employees. They rally

investors. They rally media attention. You look at, like, what Augustus is doing is deeply controversial, but he's on podcasts that are so much bigger than what normal, what is he at, series A. Like a series A founder typically is not on multiple million plus subscriber podcasts. Yeah. Doing a tour. Going and talking to people that are actively disagree with what he's doing. Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, we talk to founders all day long who come on and, oh, they raised it a billion dollar valuation. Or they raised a billion dollars. We had five series E companies on Tuesday. Those folks are not getting calls from the biggest media platforms in the world on day one consistently on a regular basis.

And I think it's because of that they're going after more tractable problems, they're going after things that are less controversial, but also there's just something interesting about actually refocusing on tackling those really, really big issues. And so there's something where I feel like the fear of like targeting the Antichrist turns into like, you know, Gerardian scapegoat. You've got to find someone to blame everything on. I'm worried about how all that shapes up, but I am optimistic about this idea of venture capitalists

returning to the super high risk. It's either a zero or a trillion dollars. It either is a completely useless company that doesn't get anything done, or they cure cancer, or they build a flying car, or they build the rocket that goes to space. And even if Elon hasn't gotten us to Mars, we're not multi-planetary yet, he's still able to ship Starlink. It's great business. and then also keep everyone still motivated on

how cool would it be if they actually got to Mars? That's amazing. It's another 20 years. We need AI to benefit humanity. They're oriented around safety, right? This is a nonprofit. This is work that needs to be done. That's not going to get funded through the capital markets.

And then it turns into an internet software. And so I don't know what your timeline is for SpaceX getting to Mars. It might be 20 years, maybe 30 years. but at least it keeps them focused on, you know, chopping wood and working hard to actually advance the underlying technology that we get a lot of value on through just satellites and stuff. And I think that the same thing could be true for the AI companies where, yeah, maybe we don't get the AGI God ASI super soon, but there's just like a ton of value and you keep working at it because it's delivering value in the short to medium term, but you're able to keep the sites really, really, really high. and that drives just like that's just what you need to actually marshal all the energy to go back something really huge anyway Tyler have you been following the the the Antichrist lecture series vibes at all what's your take I read I read the first like set of notes that came out by the person who I think got in trouble band notes you got to them before they were taken down off the internet oh they were taken down I believe so I couldn't find them I don't think people are really missing anything because most of that stuff was like

in other podcasts. Yeah, most of it was in the Hoover Institution podcast with Peter Robinson. Yeah. So, I mean, the vibes are, like, most of the stuff I've seen online were just, like, the protests outside of it. Yeah. I thought were, like, pretty funny. Yeah. But it does feel like this is definitely in the, in the early stages of, like, it's, it's definitely, like, working these bits out and figuring out how all the pieces fit together into some sort of narrative or conclusion.

But it's interesting, and not many other venture capitalists are talking about it. So at least it's different and fresh. Anyway, Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. There we go. We got a little bit of a bear take from Jerry Newman over in Colossus. AI will not make you rich.

I feel like AI is already making tons of people rich. I wonder, I wonder what's going on. Let's read through some of this. So, kick it off. Jerry writes, in Colossus Mag, which you should subscribe to, of course. Fortunes are made by entrepreneurs and investors when revolutionary technologies enable waves of innovative, investable companies. Think of the railroad, the Bessemer process. I don't actually don't know what the Bessemer process is.

Tyler, what's the Bessamer process? Electric power, the internal combustion engine. It was mass producing steel. Mass-producing steel from molten pig iron. Were there lots of steel startups at the time, I suppose? Interesting. Each of which, like a stray spark in a fireworks factory, set off decades of follow-on innovation, permeated every part of society, and catapulted a new set of inventions

and investors into power, influence, and wealth. Yet some technological innovations, though societally transformative, generate little in the way of new wealth. Instead, they reinforced the status quo. 15 years before the microprocessor, another revolutionary idea, shipping containerization arrived at a less propitious time when technological advancement was a red queen's race and inventors and investors were left no better off

for nonstop running. Interesting. I didn't know that about the containerization story. Anyone who invests in the new new thing must answer two questions. First, how much value will this innovation create? And second, who will capture it? Information and communication technology was a revolution whose value was captured by startups and led to thousands of newly rich founders, employees and investors. Also called high technology, high tech.

Yes. I'm very excited to see where he takes this because I feel like there are already, what, thousands of new millionaires in the AI boom, just from secondary sales? Check out the prices of starter homes in San Francisco. Yeah, like it's happening. Didn't Open AI just do a $10 billion tender offer or something? Like, there's liquidity flowing. people are getting rich. Not to mention how many individual indie founders are making a lot of money

and building various AI apps and experience. Also just people that went long Nvidia or have been buying calls on Nvidia at various times or or Leopoldosh and Brenner. Like there's a bunch of people that have figured out different ways to make money. What do you think? I mean, yeah, there's that set of the like this was like maybe three years old or something, but about the Nvidia employees and it was like 75% of them are worth over a million dollars. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's, like, probably 90% now. Yeah. And so, I don't know, maybe he has to argue for, like, collapse of everything.

We'll see where this goes. Is generative AI more like the former containerization or the latter, IT revolution? Will it be the basis of many future industrial fortunes or a net loser for the investment community as a whole with a few, with a few zero-sum winners here and there? There are ways to make money investing in the fruits of AI, but they will depend on assuming the latter. That is, once again, a less propitious time for investors. inventors, that AI model builders and application companies will eventually compete each other into an oligopoly, I believe that's true, and that the gains from AI will not accrue to its builders, but to customers. A lot of the money pouring into AI is therefore being invested in

the wrong places. And aside from a couple lucky early investors, those who make money will be the ones with the foresight to get out early. What do you think, Jordy? I mean, I'm in, I mean, we got it, We got to, I don't want to, I don't want to just start, just dunk it. Keep reading the microprocessor. Yeah, so the micro, but the main thing is in venture, it's really hard to get out early if you're investing with real size. Yes, totally. If you're writing a $200 million check, it's not like at the next round. You're like, oh, nice, I got a 3x markup.

I'm going to, I'm going to sell 600 million in secondary dollar. And this is, this is something you see on the timeline. people usually annon accounts saying like oh these multi-stage funds are just dumping on you and all this stuff and it's like like yes at times funds can exit some of their positions smaller funds can exit entirely but by and large if you led an early round you're not able to just fully exit and you might even be locked up post-IPO there's a bunch of ways it would be very funny if you know how everyone's like, let SBF out of jail. He got a stake in Anthropic.

There was something else somebody was sharing this morning. I forgot about this, but he bought almost 7% of Robin Hood at the bottom. And there's like two other companies that he got, that he like nailed. He was like a fantastic trader. But did you see what Elon posted about Anthropic? He said, winning was never in the set of possible options or possible outcomes. So he's like, I said that on X yesterday, I believe. So Elon is a gig of bear on, Elon is a gig of bear on Anthropic, saying that Anthropics is zero.

And if Elon's right, then SBF looks bad again because he looked bad because he lost all the customer money. Then he looked great. Was Elon? No, no, no, completely unrelated. Completely unrelated. Elon is just trash talk in the other laps because he trash talks a bunch of the laps, right? But he was saying that, you know, oh, Anthropics is not going to lose. it's not going to win, it's going to be a zero or whatever.

He wasn't exactly saying it was going to be a zero. But he was saying, you know, winning was never in the set of possible outcomes. And so it'd be very funny if we go, if we round trip on SBF. To everyone that prayed on my downfall, pray harder. Yeah, yeah, I think it's kind of a silly, silly. I'll continue.

The microprocessor was revolutionary, but the people who invented it at Intel in 1971 did not see it that way. They just wanted to avoid designing, desktop calculator chip sets from scratch every time. But outsiders realized they could use the microprocessor to build their own personal computers, and enthusiasts did. Thousands of tinkerers found configurations and uses that Intel never dreamed of.

This distributed and permissionless invention kicked off a great surge of development, as the economist Carlotta Perez called it, triggered by technology but driven by economic and societal forces. There was no real demand for personal computers in the early 1970s. They were expensive toys, but the experimenters laid the technical groundwork and built a community. Then, around 1975, a step change in the cost of microprocessors made the personal computer market viable. The Intel 8080 had an initial list price of $360, which is $2,300 in today's dollars. MITS could barely turn a profit on its altar at a bulk price of $75 each, which is $490. Donald Boat would have gotten it done in 1975?

He would have gotten it done. He would have been putting ads. Gordon Moore, send me an Intel 80. You're on notice. He'd just be putting ads in the newspaper. He'd be writing letters to Gordon Moore. Send me computers. And Bob Noyes.

Send me an Intel 8080. But when MOS technology started selling at 6502 for $25, Steve Wozniak could afford to build a prototype Apple. 6502 and the similarly price Xilog Z-80 forced Intel's prices. down, the nascent PC community started spawning entrepreneurs and a score of companies appeared, each with a slightly different product. You couldn't have known in the mid-1970s that the PC would revolutionize everything. While Steve Jobs was telling investors that every household would someday have a personal computer, a wild underestimate, as it turned out, the others questioned the

need for personal computers at all. As late as 1979, Apple's ads didn't tell you what a personal computer could do. It asked what you would do with it. The established computer manufacturers had no interest in a product their customers weren't asking for. Nobody needed a computer, and so PCs weren't bought. They were sold. Blashy startups like Apple and Sinclair used hype to get notice, while companies with footholds and consumer electronics like Atari, Commodore, and Tandy, Radio Shack, used strong retail connections to put their PC.

Look at this controversial ad that they ran with a naked man, Adam, holding an Apple computer. The original, Cooley, maybe Steve Jobs was on to something. with the viral marketing being controversial. Yeah, this is an insane. We're looking for the most original use of an Apple since Adam. What in the name of Adam? What in the name of Adam do people do with Apple computers? You tell us in a thousand words or less.

If your story is original and intriguing enough, you could win a one week, all expense paid trip for two to Hawaii. Giveaways. Giveaways. This is wild. What insane Apple lore. Steve Jobs is really on one. this the logo too with it with the the Apple stripes stripes so good so the market grew slowly at first

accelerating only as experiments led to practical applications like the spreadsheet let's give it up for the spreadsheet introduce the best inventions of all time hit that horn as use grow observation of use caused a reduction in uncertainty leading to more adoption in a self-reinforcing cycle this kind of gathering momentum takes time in every technological wave it took almost 30 years for electricity to reach of American households, for example, and it took about the same amount of time for personal computers. When a technological revolution changes everything, it takes a huge amount of innovation, investment, storytelling, time, and plain old work. It also sucks up all the money and talent available. Like Coons, paradigms, and science, any technology not part of the wave's techno-economic

paradigm will seem like a sideshow. Well, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin. Devon is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team at your fingertips in your slack. Let's continue. The nascent growth of PCs attracted investors, venture capitalists who started making risky bets on new companies. This development incentivized more inventors, entrepreneurs and researchers. You don't hear enough about inventors anymore. Everyone wants to be a founder. No one wants to be an inventor. I want to meet some folks who just are like, yeah, I'm just working on an invention. What about Riley Walls? He's joining the show later today. He's kind of inventor-coded. I think he's an inventor.

You called him a rascal, something like that. Internet rascal. Internet rascal, which is, I think, fantastic. But I think of him as an inventor, which in turn, and all of this drew more speculative capital. Companies like IBM, the computing behemoth before the PCs, saw poor relative performance. They didn't believe the PC could survive long enough

to become capable in their market and didn't care about new small markets that wanted a cheaper solution. Retroactively, we gave the PC, we give the PC pioneers the power of profits. That's, well, that's a lot of alliteration, rather than visionaries. But at the time, nobody outside a small group of early adopters paid any attention. Establishing media, like the New York Times, didn't take the PC seriously until after IBMs was introduced in August of 1981. In the entire year of 1976, when Apple Computer was founded, the NYT mentioned PCs only four times.

Apparently, only the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, and the troublemakers were paying attention. this is a total mentions of personal computers in the new york times overtime and uh exponential growth from 1979 to 1984 crazy that it actually peaked in 94 84 sorry it peaks in 84 sorry and then it was dropping throughout the 80s well it's old news you know it's over yeah everyone has a PC i mean how many articles are there about like social media today this year or like smartphones like there just aren't as many as there were during the boom. That's the nature of these days. Still, the full New York Times.

Yeah, but, I mean, there's just so many times when you can just, like, you know, it just melts into the background of the story. But it's a good point. It's the element of surprise that should strike us most forcefully when we compare the early days of the computer revolution to today. No one took note of personal computers in the 1970s.

In 2025, AI is all we seem to talk about. Big companies hate surprises. You want to continue here? Big companies hate surprises. That's why uncertainty makes a perfect moat for startups. Apple would never have survived IBM entering the market in 1979 and only lived to compete another day after raising $100 million in its 1980 IPO.

It was the only remaining competitor after the IBM induced winnowing. There's IBM and Apple. They're the only two survivors. All these other companies, the Altaire, the Amiga, the Atari ST all fell off. But the Mac and the IBM PC ripped onward. International business machines.

You'd love to see it. As the tech took hold and started to show promise innovations in software, memory, and peripherals like floppy disk drives and modems joined it, they reinforced one another with each advance putting pressure on the technologies adjacent to it. When any part of the system held back the other parts, investors rushed to fund that sector. As increases in PC memory allowed more complicated software, there became a need for more external storage, which caused VC Dave Market to invest in disk drive manufacturer Seagate in 1980. Seagate gave a 40x return when it went public in 1981. Other investors noticed and some 270 million was plowed into the industry in the following three years.

Seagate's been ripping, right? All the hard drive makers because all the AI companies need to store a ton of training data, RL data, they're generating a huge amount of data, images, videos, all sorts of stuff, and all of that needs more storage. Yeah, up 109% in the past. I remember, I think we read an article about the hard drive boom like a year ago, and it was, we're still early. I know. That's actually crazy. I remember it was like in the first like 10 episodes.

Yeah, we were like, oh, this is kind of a boring story, but it's kind of interesting and it seems important. So we read about Seagate. Let's check in with Western Digital. Another 118. Another 100-bagger, a little easy double. Money also poured into the underlying infrastructure, fiber optic networks, chip making, etc. so that the capacity was never a bottleneck. Companies which used a new technological system to outperform incumbents began to take market share,

and even competitors realized they needed to adopt the new thing or die. The hype became a froth, which became an investment bubble. Let's give it up for bubbles. The dot-com frenzy of the late 1990s. the ICT wave was therefore similar to the previous ones, like the investment mania of the 1830s and the roaring 20s, which followed the infrastructure build out of canals and railways, respectively, in which the human response to each stage predictably generated the next. When the dot-com bubble popped, society found it disapproved of the excesses in the sector,

and governments found they had the popular support to resort authority over the tech companies and their investors. This put a break on the madness instead of the reckless innovation of the bubble. Well, all companies started to expand into proven markets, and financiers moved from speculating to investing. Entrepreneurs began to focus on finding applications rather than on innovating the underlying technologies. Technological improvements continued, but change became more evolutionary than revolutionary. Look at this chart. Technological waves over time, the industrial revolution, the canal mania. I wasn't even familiar at this. Arkwright Mill opens in 1771. I would love to. I would love to. I would love.

love to watch a documentary or even a drama. Canal mania. Yeah, this has the underrated mania. Totally. People always talk about tulip. Tulips, yeah. Tulips doesn't even count because it's not a real technology. So the actual technological waves that are highlighted here, the industrial revolution, steam in railways, steel, electricity, and heavy engineering, then oil the automobile and mass production from 1908 to 1974, and the 1971 onward is information and telecommunication, and pretty remarkable results from this. 27% rise in real GDP through the 2010 to 2019 era. That's pretty good.

In contrast, society did not need a bubble to pop to start excoriating AI, given the backlash to tech that has been going on for a decade. This seems normal to us, but the AI backlash differs from the general high regard earlier in the cycle enjoyed by the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and the others who built big tech businesses. the world hates change and only gave tech a pass in the 80s and 90s because it all seemed reversible. It could be made to go away if it turned out badly. This gave the early computer innovator some leeway to experiment. Now that everyone knows computers are here to stay,

AI is not allowed the same wait and see attitude. It is seen as part of the information technology revolution. Perez, the economist, breaks each technological wave into four predictable phases, eruption, frenzy, synergy, and maturity. This is a new Gartner, hype cycle. We need to know where are we on the curve? The Perez tech wave. I think we're right around frenzy. We're definitely past eruption, maybe going into synergy and maturity next. The middle two, frenzy and synergy are the easy ones for investors. Frenzy is when everyone piles in and investors are rewarded for taking big risks on unproven ideas culminating in the bubble. When paper profits disappear. When rationality returns, the synergy phase begins as

companies make their products usable and productive. Everybody's scared of it. crash. They're not eager for synergy. Yeah. So investing in the maturity phase is even more difficult in eruption. It's hard to see what will happen. In maturity, nothing much happens at all. Nothing ever happens. The uncertainty about what will work and how customers and society will react is almost gone. Things are predictable. Everyone acts predictably. The lack of dynamism allows successful synergy companies to remain entrenched, see the nifty 50 and fang, but growth becomes harder they all start to enter each other's markets conglomerate raise prices cut costs the era of the it feels like Microsoft's in that in that bucket certainly already companies frame this is a drive to win but it's really a fear of

losing should we read about the shipping container wave yeah shipping containerization was a late wave innovation that changed the world kicked off our modern era of globalization result in profound changes to society and the economy and contributed to rapid growth in well-being but there were perhaps only one or two people who made real money investing in it, that is insane to hear if that's true. Yeah, and key words here are investing specifically in that technology versus benefiting from it broadly. Yeah. Because if you were in any type of business that required shipping and receiving goods from all over the world, you've benefited directly from the technological change even if you weren't like investing. in companies that were functionally creating.

Yeah, I would certainly agree. So they mark the containerization wave starting. The year is 1956. It was late in the previous wave, but that year, the company soon to be known as Sealand, revolutionized freight shipping with the launch of the first container ship, the Ideal X, or the Ideal 10. Sealand's founder, Malcolm McLean,

had an epiphany that the job to be done by truckers, railroads and shipping lines, was to move goods from shipper to destination, not to drive trucks, fill boxcars, or laid boats. Sealand allowed freight to transfer seamlessly from one mode to another, saving time, making shipping more predictable and cutting costs, both the costs of loading, unloading, and the cost of the cost of the... So prior to this, you would just have like a wooden crate that would just get thrown on a ship. Yeah.

And then you'd... So you have to stack it, unstack it, figure out how... You have to do a puzzle every single time. You want to load... Tetris. Yeah. And now it's just stack. blocking blocks, Jenga instead of Tetris, much easier to play Jenga, supposedly. The benefits of containerization, if it could be made to happen, were obvious.

Everyone could see the efficiencies, and customers don't care how something gets to where they can buy it as long as it does, but Longshoremen would lose work. Politicians would lose the votes of those who lost work. Port authorities would lose the support of their politicians. Federal regulators would be blamed for adverse consequences. Railroads might lose freight to shipping lines. Shipping lines might lose freight to new shipping lines. and it would all cost a mint.

Most thought McLean would never be able to make it work, but he squeezed through the cracks of the opposition he faced. He bought and retrofitted war surplus ships, lowering costs. He went after the coastal shipping trade, a dying business in the age of new interstates to avoid competition. He set up shop in Newark, New Jersey, rather than the shipping hub of Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, to get buy-in from the Port Authority and avoid Manhattan congestion.

And he made a deal with the New York Longshoremen's Union, which was only possible because he was a small player, whom they figured was not a threat. What's interesting is that, yeah, I think it's like the direct investment might be very concentrated, but when I think about the rise of the 60s, the 70s, the 80s globalization, I'm thinking of Nike, and I'm thinking of companies that were built on the back of globalization, even the iPhone, Apple, like these companies exist in part and are beneficiaries of containerization. And so it's not a direct investment in the fundamental technology, but it is enabled by it?

Yeah. I don't think so. Yeah, we'll have to get through the article, but it already feels like it's somewhat clickbait. Not clickbait, but to say like no one's going to make money on AI or you're not going to make money on AI. Yes. let's skip to his conclusion about generative AI. He says, let's grant that generative AI is revolutionary, but also that, as is becoming increasingly clear,

this particular new tech is now already in an evolutionary stage. It's towards the end of its cycle. It will create a lot of value for the economy, and investors hope to capture some of it. This is the key point. I totally agree. When, who, and how depends on whether AI is the end of the ICT wave or the beginning of a new one, right?

Yeah. Is it SaaS or is it got? Is it the final SaaS product and then we're stuck? Or is it something entirely new and we're just going to start competitive? Yeah. Is it consumer software? Is it enterprise software? Something entirely new, right?

I don't know. If AI had started a new wave, there would have been an extended period of uncertainty and experimentation. I feel like that's the last decade of Open AI. I feel like 2015 to 2025 was that period of uncertainty. Yeah, you have to understand. Is it people in 2015 that were trying to make chatbots, right, with no hype? Totally. Really no user, not a lot of users, right?

Yeah. Or are you just counting like when Open AI was like, okay, we can actually be a for-profit company now and we can productize this? But even then there was like a pretty large gap between them deciding like, hey, let's, let's actually raise traditional capital for this before they could get out the API. Yeah. Before they could get out, chat GPUT. Totally. Yeah.

And also, like, there was this in AI, the period of uncertainty and experimentation, that was the TikTok algorithm, the Netflix recommendation algorithm, Facebook's core AI investments. They have bought billions of dollars of GPUs, not for generative AI, not for LOMs, but just to make better ad recommendations, better content recommendations. And so there's, I don't know, there's a lot there. We'll have to continue to dig in, but let's keep reading. He said, when thousands or millions of tinkers use the tech to solve problems in entirely new ways, its use is proliferate.

But because they are using models owned by the big AI companies, their ability to fully experiment is limited to what's allowed by the incumbents who have no desire to permit an extended challenge to the status quo. This doesn't mean AI can't start the next technological revolution. it might, if experimentation becomes cheap, distributed, and permissionless, like Wozniak, cobbling together computers in his garage, Ford building his first internal combustion engine in his kitchen, and Trevechnik building his high-pressure steam engine as soon as James Watts' patents expired, when any would-be innovator can build and train an LLM on their laptop and put it to use in any way

their imagination dictates, it might be the seat of the next big set of changes, something revolutionary rather than evolutionary. but until, unless that happens, there can be no eruption. Tyler, like, don't you think it's possible to build and train an LLM on your laptop and use it in any way your imagination dictates? Yeah. I mean, I don't know about training a whole new LLM, but like people are getting a lot of value out of open source ones that they're locally. Lama, Deep Sea, Klan. It seems like barely obvious. Yeah. It doesn't, I mean, I somewhat agree that we haven't seen that many totally new, crazy

like unprecedented uses of LLMs where it feels like it's an entirely new category. Like it's hard to point at like the Uber for AI where it's like this company would never have existed. It feels like a lot of the companies are kind of evolutionary. Like, you know, we have site builders and then we have vibe coding platforms that's very... It's on top of them.

Figma.com. A lot of the companies. Figma helps design and development teams build. Great products together. Get started for free. Use Figma Make, if you want to develop a website. Yeah, a lot of times companies come on TBPN to talk about what they're building. They're building an AI application.

There is a company started 10 years ago basically doing the exact same thing. They just didn't position it in the same way. They weren't using prompts and they weren't using reasoning and things like that. But still, it looks and it looks and sounds like it's solving the same SaaS problem definition. It's like the problem was like organizing information for lawyers or answering the phone. And we had a phone tree that was just deterministic, like robotic press too for, you know, customer support. And oftentimes they can solve a problem. It's like a product can be twice as good.

Yes. Which is enough to kind of eat into existing market share, maybe create new. markets, right? I think the market for people that can create software is obviously exploded, right? Which is why you see vibe coding, you know, revenues just exploding the billions of dollars collectively. But it does seem like the video games are getting more realistic. Video games are getting more realistic. The software is getting better. The spreadsheets have more useful tools. There's just a little extra helper everywhere. It's a lot of co-pilots. It's not a lot of like entirely new planes.

And then you see ChatGBT, GBT, and it's, the usage looks a lot like the way that people use Google search. Yeah. It's better in many ways, but the core value that's being delivered is quite similar. He actually talks about domain-specific model. So first, he says economists are predicting that AI will increase global GDP somewhere between one to more than 7% over the next decade, which is one to seven trillion of new value created. The big question is where.

that money will stick as it flows through the value chain. Most AI market overviews have a score or more categories, breaking each of them into customers and industry served, but these will change dramatically over the next few years. You could instead just follow the money to simplify the taxonomy of companies. There are data infrastructure companies, there are model companies, user application companies, AI customers and consumers. But what the history of containerization suggests, if you aren't already an investor in a model company, you shouldn't bother. Sam Altman and a few other early movers may make a fortune, as McLean and Ludwig did. But the huge cost of building and running a model coupled with the intense competition means there will, in the end, be only a few

companies, each funded and owned by the largest tech companies. If you're already an investor, congratulations, there will be consolidation, so you might get an exit. Domain-specific models like Cursor and Her Harvey will be part of the consolidation. These are probably the most valuable models, but fine-tuning is relatively cheap, and there are big economies of scope, on the other hand, just as Google had to buy Invite Media in 2010 to figure out how to sell to ad agencies, domain-specific model companies that have earned the trust of their customers will be prime acquisition targets. That sounds like another group of people that would be making money.

When you say, like, only Open AI investors will make money, it's like, well, there are like 7,000 people on that cap table in one way or another. Like all the investors, all the LPs and the funds that are investors, all the employees, All the people that got in through SVVs, like, it's not just two people. I feel like it's a lot of people that are in the big winners, like even if there's just a few power law winners. Yeah, there's other, you know, another way to look into this is like if you're investing in a series A at a $300 million valuation, assuming just crazy explosive growth,

it's very possible to the company, even if it does well, would someday sell for a few hundred million dollars. and you wouldn't have actually made any money even though you got an exit. Yeah, here's a good, like, counters point to some of the companies that are potentially in a more precarious situation. So he says, while it's too late to invest in the model companies, the profusion of those using the models to solve specific problems is ongoing. Perplexity, inflection AI, writer, a bridge, and 100 others. But if any of these become very valuable, the model companies will take their earnings, either through discriminatory pricing or vertical integration, launch their own competitor. Success, in other words, will mean defeat always a bad thesis. At some point, model companies and app companies will converge.

There will be simply AI companies, and only a few of them. There will be some winners, as always, but investments in the app layer as a whole will lose money. The same caveat applies, however. If an app company can build a customer base or an amazing team, it might be acquired. But these companies aren't really technology companies at all. They're building a market on spec and have to be priced as such. A further caveat is that there will be investors who make. a killing, arbitraging FOMO, panicked acquirers, willing to massively overpay, but this isn't

really investing, he says. And so, again, it's another group of people that will get rich, but it's maybe not a durable source of alpha, which is an interesting thought. Where else? Let's keep going. This is a very long article. You should go read the full thing. So let's close this out by reading his conclusion.

And, of course, if you want to read the full piece, you can head over to. colossus mag. There is nothing better than the beginning of a new wave when the opportunities to envision, invent, and build world-changing companies leads to money, fame, and glory. But there is nothing more dangerous for investors and entrepreneurs than wishful thinking. The lesson learned from investing in tech over the last 50 years are not the right ones to apply now. The way to invest in AI is to think through the implications of knowledge workers becoming more efficient, to imagine what markets this efficiency unlocks, and to invest in those. For decades, the way to to make money was to bet on what the new thing was.

Now you have to bet on the opportunities. It opens up. So Jerry Newman, he's a retired venture investor. Totally, totally agree with this conclusion, right? I think if you come in with a $200 million venture fund right now and are just investing at crazy multiples, pre-revenue, investing in new foundation model labs, you're going to have a really tough time.

But that doesn't mean. And I don't know, I think saying, like, the app layer as a whole will lose money, at least when you look at private markets, right, the whole point is that a lot of the companies can go to zero and, like, a handful of them will create enormous value, and that's okay, right? So not that bearish, but I do think it's not a, you know, at this stage in the market, spraying and praying is going to lead to some bad outcomes. Yeah. Really understanding the opportunities, really understanding that, hey, maybe this is,

a lot of the winners here are going to look more like traditional software. Yeah. And that's okay, but it just means you have to be, you know, I think the company we had on yesterday, Filevine, a good example of this, started as enterprise software for law firms. Yeah, already has a ton of clients. Now, you know, they have 100,000 lawyers actively using the product every day. in a really good position to vend in a variety of different models.

And they will, depending on how they execute, prove to be a big challenge for new AI-native companies that will have to decide, do we want to be sort of ancillary product, or do we want to own the workflows? And if we want to own the workflows, we have to rebuild all these different products that help a firm run and do that with maybe a 10-year, 10 years behind other players in the category.

Yeah. I mean, Venture's always been the game of pick the winner in the category, but it feels like it's more important than ever to actually define the category because, and understand, is this particular category going to have one winner or three winners or two winners? Is it going to wind up being a duopoly or a oligopoly? I'm excited to talk to President Taylor about this. He's building, you know, he's the 800-pound career.

in AI for customer engagement experience, right? But it's a category that has an active capital war going on. You have heavily funded new players like Sierra and Decagon. You have the intercoms of the world that are taking. Finn.a.i, the number one AI agent for customer service. We're going to ask Brad Taylor about his performance benchmarks, his competitive bakeoffs, his ranking on G2. because we are obviously supporters of Finn,

but interested in following the fight. And I am very interested in how oligopolistic will that particular market be. There are certain markets that have just kind of run away. It certainly feels like just in terms of knowledge retrieval, we could be looking at a monopoly with OpenAI and Shagipi or a duopoly with Gemini. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be 10 search engines

and 10 default chat apps that people are going to. Or 10 deep research APIs. Exactly. Yeah, it feels like there's going to be one or two that kind of compound and people get comfortable with and they stick with. Yeah. Well, in other news, Emmett says,

I'm excited to share Rora Water is the official partner of Huberman Lab for Water. Rora is of course company I co-founded a while ago and worked on this partnership with the Huberman Lab team Rob and Andrew for a very, very long time at this point

we started talking about it probably a year ago, well started talking about it maybe a couple years ago actually got them product over about a year ago. They used it a bunch they tested it a bunch and finally launched this partnership earlier this week so absolutely thrilled to get this across the line.

And, yeah, big vote of confidence from the Huberman team. I love it. And in other Huberman World News, his network, SciComm Media, is working on a new show with none other than David Senra. It's David Senra by David Senra. Yeah, the show is called David Senra. Hosted by David Senra. Yeah, they picked David Senra as the host of the David Senra show.

Yeah. And so we will watch the launch video that he put out on X yesterday. Pull it up. Nine years ago, I launched Founders. Today, we're watching a new podcast called David Senra. Nine years ago, I launched the Founders podcast. On Founders, I tell the stories of history's greatest entrepreneurs and extreme winners. This week, I'm launching a new podcast called David Senra.

On this show, I sit down for conversations with the best living founders in the world. I'm ready with you are so good. How many camp do you have three cameras? People like Daniel Eck, Michael Dell. Brad Jacobs, Todd Graves, Michael Ovitz, and many others. My goal with everything I do is to obsessively study the greats and find timeless ideas that you can use in your work. We have to change or we're going to go out of business. And now you can learn directly from these legendary founders.

You know what I see in the most common core of all the people that are successful for me is they're never satisfied. You said something interesting. I like the pressure. I do. Thrive on it. Founders will still come out every week. And this new show will now have episodes dropping every other Sunday on all platforms, like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, X, and everywhere else that you find your podcasts. There are parts of me that still live in the valley. When did you know you were good?

I don't know that I'm good. I know I'm different. And I'm out there for this chicken finger dream. Failure's not an option. Nothing is going to stop me from doing it. It's binary. We need a wall that we can set up here and run through. Or death.

That's great. Dan in the chat says the market is not ripping. What are the white suits for today? Bitcoin is up. One half percent. It's a bright spot. It's a bull market in a lack of volatility. If you were short volatility, you've done very well today, right?

Because it's not a volatile market market. There's always a bull market market. No, I mean, it's a little rough out there. It's just a fun day to put on a white suit. We just feel like we were feeling some optimism. We were, you know, have fun. We just had some good energy in the studio this morning. We wanted to, we thought maybe if we put on the white suits, the market.

Yeah, we'd be able to materialize a bull market. Let's make it happen. You're trying to send it. Anyway, before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vant's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Did you see this post from Sheel?

He said, interesting. We might see in New York Stock Exchange IPO where the underlying asset is a bunch of paintings. Billionaire Thomas Kaplan is exploring, taking his Leiden collection. 17 Rambrance of Vermeer, et cetera. Worth 1.5 to 3 billion public. This is the next generation of the digital asset treasury, the Dats. You have the physical asset treasury, the Pats, and these will be able to invest in art.

There's been a couple companies that allowed you to invest in art. There was an art platform for a while that was doing that. Yeah, I mean, in general, taking art highly, I mean, art is liquid, but not at sort of like market prices, right? So if you want to sell art quickly, you have to sell it at a massive discount, right?

You need to be super patient. If you have a big collection and you're holding it, especially if you have a bunch of work from a single artist if you bring 10 pieces online right at the same time you flood the market with supply prices will come down so it's a very weird thing but this makes sense if thomas wants to be able to uh get out all at once or get out get out partially uh get some liquidity uh this is probably more effective than um than selling uh you know just selling it selling it it piece by piece.

And he gets to hold on to the art, too. That's the other thing. Oh, yeah. I mean, he can still store it. He can probably keep some in, you know, different properties, et cetera. Well, we have our first guest of the show. Brad Taylor coming into the telegram from the roosterone from the roosterone room. How are you doing?

I didn't get the wardrobe notice. Yeah. We normally wear white suits when the market is ripping and we're celebrating. But Sierra's ripping. But Sierra's ripping. So we're celebrating you. We're wearing them for you. Thank you for celebrating our growth. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, it's been fantastic. Give us the brief history, the founding of the company to the news just last week. Yeah, so Sierra, we help companies build AI agents for customer experience. So think maybe it's on a website, maybe it's answering the phone. No one likes to wait on hold. Now you can chat with an AI agent. We're helping do everything from originate mortgages to help you get a better rate on your serious XM plan to helping, you know, when you're, ADT home alarm system doesn't work. You'll now chat with an AI agent to fix it. We're a couple years old. We're the leader in this space. We kind of uniquely have run towards, I would say, larger enterprise businesses. We're trying to help companies that, candidly, it's hard for them to deploy AI because they've got lots of legacy systems. Maybe they're in a regulated business,

like the health insurance market or banking with the whole hypothesis is if we can help them be successful, there's just a ton of value and leverage in that. So, So as you mentioned, a couple weeks ago, we announced a recent round of financing, which is we're proud of just a milestone on the path, but I think kind of recognizes our leadership in this space. You're the chairman of Open AI. How should I think about application layer versus model layer? I'm sure you get this all the time.

There was a meme for a long time about, oh, Open AI is going to go on stage dev day and just steamroll a bunch of companies. You seem to have good information on what they're going to steamroll and not. Yeah. And the other thing is there was so many, you know, two years ago, so many different companies that had thriving businesses doing customer, various customer service platforms. Sure.

And, you know, many people would have said, these companies are just going to move quickly on AI, get this, you know, they have the customer relationships. But you clearly saw it differently and have proven that that hasn't been necessarily the case. I'll answer both. I'll start with the foundation models. My theory of how the market plays out is that the, foundation model market will look a little bit like the infrastructure as a service market where it you know primarily provides technology low level technology to a lot of applications companies

and then there's all the adjacencies you know like if you look at amazon web services they've got some developer tools if you're kind of in the area like snowflake and data bricks there's probably an amazon product that competes with you the farther you go towards serving a line of business you know like erp systems or CRM systems the less likely is that you're going to run into, you know, an infrastructure provider competing with you. I think the same is roughly true in the AI market. You know, if you think about what's required to make AGI, it's a lot of, like, you know, training stuff, but it's also maybe software engineering agents. So that's probably sort of in the target of these foundation model companies. The closer

you get to, you know, Harvey doing legal AI or CERA doing customer service AI probably doesn't seem in the core of these, you know, research labs, you know, primary. function. The reason I think that the applied AI market is exciting, not just for Sierra, obviously I'm very loyal to my own company. I don't think most companies want to buy a bag of floating point numbers and then figure out what to do with it. They want to buy a solution to their problem. And if they can turn on Sierra and it will answer the phone and bring down their customer service costs by 50% overnight, they're going to do that, not try to take these models and try to do it from scratch. If they can buy Harvey and get an antitrust

review for one-tenth of cost, they're going to do that. And I think, you know, I was talking to Toby Luckey at Shopify one time and he was joking how many people come up to him and me. I'm like, aren't you just a database in the cloud? And you're like, yeah, I guess so. But there's a lot more to it. And it turns out these workflows are valuable. So I'm really banking in our company that there's a lot of value in these agents. And I, but going to the second question on the incumbent software providers in this space, it's very hard to disrupt your own business model. If you're licensing customer service software per seat and you have to make an AI agent that will actually cannibalize your own business to realize the value of this new technology. That's not just a

technology problem, right? That's a business model transition. And the history of technology is littered with companies that saw the slow motion car wreck of their business model being hurt by a technology trend and not really being able to respond to it fast enough. And I have so much respect for people like Sacha who navigated those transitions, but, you know, candidly, there's a lot more companies in history that didn't navigate transitions like that. And I think that's candidly just a simple reason why it's hard for a lot of the incumbent companies to respond to this new technology trend. When you were thinking about starting this company, did you, did you, like, how methodical were you about mapping the market? Is there like a whiteboard

picture of you looking at, maybe I should do ERP? Maybe I, you know, was this one of a few options that you narrowed down once you studied the market or was it something that just came to you in a fugue state or something? Yeah, it's such an interesting you said that. We actually did call up some, you know, potential customers. We started those conversations just saying, hey, if you could put us on one problem, what would it be? And by the end, we had a pretty clear picture of the available markets. I don't think any of it was particularly surprising in some ways. You know, it's like software engineering, customer service, content marketing. You all these things that come up when you think about, if you have a technology that can see

and understand text and voice, that can reason, you know, what are the direct applications? But kind of the thing that we're most excited about is not where we are today, but where it might head. And our whole theory is that your AI agent will end up more important than your website or your mobile app in the future. And as a consequence, we think the addressable opportunity here isn't just customer service, which is really compelling and interesting, but saying, you know, how can you actually drive more sales?

How can you actually create a personalized concierge for your brand? I mean, just to give the math of it, if you actually have a phone call with a human being, it probably will cost on the order of $20 at least, and it really depends whether it's onshore or offshore. If you think about running a large-scale consumer brand with an ARPOO of $20, you know, how do you afford that and you can't?

And as a consequence, it's almost impossible to talk to most consumer brands. You bring down that cost to 20 cents, or even two cents over time, you just think about the dynamics. Let's say you're a large mobile phone carrier and you're fighting for retaining your subscribers. You're not just going to recoup cost savings and customer service. You're going to say, how many phone calls

can I have with my customers so that I retain the subscriber for five more years? Think about the impact on your lifetime value of your customer. So what's exciting about this, like so many new technologies, is like the first order effect is obvious, which is saying, hey, let's reduce the cost of customer service, by 50%. The second afforded effects are almost more exciting, which is the companies that lean into this faster will actually grow their top line faster than their competitors. So

that's what's so fun about technology disruption, right? You can end up ending, you know, sort of the incumbent versus insurgent dynamic. At the same time, the value proposition to the companies using Sierra is more than just cost reduction. It's saying, like, how can we actually give you a competitive edge by moving faster in this new world of AI. How are companies actually, you know, you're going and landing some of the probably just crazy logos, right? And these are, you know, massive companies with, you know, operations all over the world. How are they actually rolling it out? Are they giving you specific sort of segments, regions? You're proving it out at a smaller scale? Or what does the actual rollout look like?

Yeah, so starting, you're right, one of the things I'm most proud of is the scale of some of the companies working with us. Over half of our customers have over a billion in revenue, over 20% have 10 billion of revenue or more, which is pretty, I'm just really proud of that. I think it shows you do not need to be a small startup to deploy AI successfully with Sierra. On the rollout, it's a very, kind of a variation of what you said. Some companies start with us on a use case or two. We're going live with one of the largest healthcare companies in the world and actually, replacing their IVR system, you know, and it was just in a handful of months to do that. So, you know, it can really, I think it's really up to the customer how assertively or aggressively

they want to roll out these new technologies. And the thing that I've been most pleasantly surprised is some of the largest, more well-regulated companies in the world actually want to move faster. I was having a conversation with my co-founder, Clay, about one of our largest clients and kind of being awe-inspired about how fast they're moving. And I said, now I know why they're big. You know, I know why they're successful because they're moving faster than some of their smaller competitors that we also work with. And you kind of, you really learn to respect the, I say, intentionality, assertiveness of a lot of these, like, really well-run companies. What's the sales process for a huge company like that? Is that, like, you meet the CEO at a, you know, fancy conference and start pitching?

I mean, like, it feels like an advantage of, like, having a career like yours and the Rolodex that, like, that's sort of like the unfair advantage. here? Yeah, in many ways, Sierra, like, you know, doing what you guys have done in two years is incredibly impressive, yet at the same time, it's what I would expect out of the team, right? I mean, there's like Palantir and Carp. Like, he's just so fun to talk to. He's in all these interesting places. And it's like, yeah, I could imagine that some big Fortune 500 company just wants to hang out with Carp and, like, talk to him. And then, oh, they do a deal together. Is that how it works? Well, it's funny when you said, this is what I expected. This is like why it's hard to start multiple companies. Like, yeah, of course it's going to be a successful.

I'm like, have you ever started a fucking company? It's hard. But, uh, but uh, yeah, but I mean, it's, uh, and I, and I, and I say that as like a, as a compliment where it's like, it's, yeah, going from zero to a $10 billion company, having, you know, this crazy, you know, list of customers is incredibly difficult. But I like when people have a lot of advantages through what they've done in their career and their network. And then they just put on an absolute master class. Like, it's, it's very satisfying. Well, I appreciate you saying, and, you know, it does all have to start with the product, though, you know, because certainly I would say, my guess is the way I think of Sierra is we have the best product, but because we have a founding team that sort of been there and done that, we're not like a hugely risky bet. You know, we know how to work with large companies. We're not going to show up and be learning from, you know, first principles how to engage with a large bank or a large health insurance company. And that's a unique value proposition because right now, most of the incumbent technology platforms, their products don't really work.

And so you really want to use a best of breed product right now. And I think our value proposition is we are a best of breed. I believe the best of breed product in this space. But we also know how to like work with complex companies. You know, we're going to show up with as many people necessary to help you be successful, as opposed to just throwing a product over the wall and saying good luck to you. And so that I think I, you know, certainly our reputation helps. But at the end of the day, it's the quality of the product that really matters here.

And just think about it this way. If you have 400 million phone calls a year, the difference between having an AI answer 100 or 300 million of them is probably measured, you know, and at least eight or nine figures, right, in terms of like the impact on your business. And so we always start with the product. And as you said, take advantage of our unique,

unique advantages as a company, which fundamentally means we know how to work with you. It's sort of interesting, like it just turns out that, you know, there's lots of different stakeholders between a business team, a technology team, compliance, understanding, just like the constraints that a company is dealing with, we just try to show up with a ton of empathy and, you know, show up recognizing this isn't just a technology problem. You know, it's sort of a kind of bureaucratic word, but it's a change management problem. You know, how do you get from point A to point D when

your auditor and your regulator is scrutinizing everything you do? Well, we understand that. Like, we're going to help you with that problem, not just the technology problem. What do you think the steady state of commerce interactions look like, because I imagine that companies will be using AI to interface with their customers, but then customers will be using AI agents to negotiate on their behalf and select products. And without leaking too much of the open AI roadmap, I think we're all pretty convinced that some sort of agentic commerce thing is going to happen. I'm already seeing pop-ups for, you know, links to products when I search for things, I'm going to be able to say, hey, go get me the best option, the best price. Is the future voice agent talking to another

voice agent, or do they just interact at some lower level, API level at some point? Like, how does that all play out when you get agent-on-agent warfare? I think you're right about your intuition, but it's also, as you were sort of alluding to, the future's not perfectly clear, even for people in the middle of it like me. But I think in general, I think a lot of intent has already gone from search towards chat GPT, especially for the more considered the purchases, the more you're likely to use something like AI. You know, when I was traveling this past summer, I used chat TBT to plan the entire trip. If you think about something serious like purchasing a home or, you know, I've talked to so many friends who are using chat TV to figure out, how's the school district in this area,

what neighborhoods are good, you know. And you think about that. just from a commercial standpoint, that is extremely qualified intent at the very top of the funnel and so much research is already being done there. But as you alluded to, the thing that's not happening is you're not kicking off your agent to go fulfill that transaction. It sort of stands to reason to me that that will likely happen at some point. And then the question is for a lot of our customers are sort of on the other end of that is how do you want to show up in that new world? You know, how do you ensure that, you know, your goods and services show up in the right way, when you're engaging with an agent.

How much do you want to directly engage with consumers? How much will you be able to directly engage with consumers? I don't know all the answers, but step one is make an agent. You know, step one is, you know, make an agent so that whatever interagent protocols emerge, you can be present and do business in that new world. And that's one of the main value propositions Sierra provides its customers, is like, we don't know exactly where the world's going to go, but a prerequisite is to technically be able to interoperate in that new world.

I think it's going to impact different industries differently. Do you think the form will generally die where there's certain businesses out there that sell, basically sell product. Let's say like a company that makes aircraft, right? If you go to their website, you're not just like browsing inventory and checking out. It's like you submit. Yeah, you're not adding to cart. Tesla's likes to do add to cart buttons on, you know, not in figure.

Many companies out there. Let's say somebody, aviation and three. wants to buy a small plane. They've got a contact sales. And then like the second you get to the form, so much like so many leads just die at the form. And something I've been doing with LLMs is just talking to them about like the pricing of different products.

Because I don't want to go to the form and like get a sales rep to call me. I don't want to be waiting or I'm a, I don't want to just get a call back at a random time. I don't really want to go through the, but I want to kind of understand. And so it feels like the form is something that fundamentally could just potentially go

away. And so you go to a website, you talk with an agent. Maybe you give them your information because you do want to hear more. You do want to talk to somebody at some point. But it feels like that could be going away. I agree. I mean, if you just think about qualifying a lead, which is basically what those forms are, why not ask follow up questions? Why not collect enough information so that when that great salesperson does follow up, 80% of the work is done. And it's just the the human touch part of it. You know, agents are already doing outbound sales, debt collections for credit cards, processing payroll for small businesses. These agents are already doing sales. And I think that, you know, the best salespeople, the reason why they're the best paid people in most companies

because they're worth their weight in gold. But what about the median salesperson? And my guess is you can make an AI agent that's actually quite a bit stronger than most, you know, just because you're standardizing the best practices really, really fast. You can run AB tests on AI agents. It's hard to run AB tests on people, you know. And there's so many advantages, as you said, to not only just forms, but really thinking about agents as not stuck in one part of your customer life cycle, but really managing the whole thing.

And let's just take, I don't know much about airline, you know, buying an airplane for a hobby pilot, but imagine this AI agent, sort of the concierge to the whole experience. So you're browsing around impalions, you set up an appointment, you know, what if it's collecting a bunch of information before you get on site after you, I don't do test drive an airplane, but let's say you do that, you know, afterwards it's asking you questions, maybe helping you with financing. I think that's the future where these things are going, which is whether or not a person's

involved, it's a concierge helping you through the whole process. Yeah, there's something about, you know, the consumer being proactive, engaging for information, but then, yeah, using the airplane example, let's say they don't have something in stock. You know, the agent, at what point are you guys already thinking about agents being proactive and reaching out to a customer after they already engaged? Like, I imagine a lot of the core of what you're doing today is just reacting to customer needs, inbound, questions, things like that, or problems with the product, whatever it is. But then at some point or another, the agent is going active and actually going outbound but how do you think about how do you think about that that's exactly

right i almost think of it as like maslow's hierarchy of needs of agents step one is answer the phone you know when your customers call step two is can you actually get in front of of customer issues i notice the ramp logo on the top right they're they're one of our customers and like they have like the coolest implementation of our platform the it's you know not only doing service but But really, like, I love their Ask AI function and their product. It's just one of the coolest experiences. And it's just, it's not service, right? It's basically a conversational experience around one of the best design technology products

in the world. And I think, you know, Ramp is obviously one of the best engineering teams in the world, but can every brand do that? You know, can every brand make their agent proactive, offer a conversational experience? I look at, if you've ever visited, like, Brazil or India and you look at the impact of WhatsApp, it's like, well, can you be present there in a way you weren't before? Well, yeah, you can. What an awesome opportunity for agents. So it's new channels. It's proactive. And this is really where we're trying to guide our customers. And I think, you know, kind of represents the future of our platform

in a lot of ways. The latest round, I think it's $350 on $10 billion. That feels low on the dilution side. How did you think about the amount of money you needed to raise, sizing that? I mean, you've been part of so many interesting financings throughout your career. How do you land on that and what does it say about the usage of that fund, how in capital-intensive your business is, the state of the markets right now. Just take me through the thesis for the round. Yeah, I also think of rounds in pretty simple ways, which is what valuation are you raising at?

What do you need to fill in that valuation so that if you need to raise another round or if you're going public that you've more than filled out that valuation with fundamental business metrics like in your revenue and growth rate. And then you start and then you say, okay, how much capital do you need to reach that milestone? And so that's kind of how we reached it and that 350 number. It's obviously there's a lot of precision involved, but it is a bit of an art form because you're making a lot of assumptions about the future, which is what are the capital that we need to reach the revenue scale where, you know, we can reach the next milestone in our business.

So that's how we think about it. I'm pretty methodical about it. You know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of raising too little at too high of evaluation and they end up sort of walking sort of a zombie company just because they've, they don't have the capital they need to reach the next milestone, but they've put their valuation as such that they've sort of priced themselves out of the market. So that's the main sort of thing I'm paranoid about. feel really good about how much we've raised, but more than anything, too, I feel great about

the investors we have around the table. Benchmarks, Sierra Green Oaks, Neil Mette, Green Oaks is just remarkable. And so love our board. And in particular, you know, I think about who do you want to be on the journey with to get the next milestone and really happy with the folks we have around the table. How are you thinking about IPO timelines just generally? Do you think Sierra is going to be another stripe or data bricks where you just stay private forever because you can and it's probably allows you to to whatever take more risk think long term etc or given that you've been you know done your tour of duty on the on the public side in the past i'm curious how you think about it yeah uh i don't think we're clay and i've talked a lot about this i think our intention is to eventually go public uh you know we

There's a lot of advantages to stay in private. I also think there's a lot of advantages to sort of having liquidity for your employees, you know, that access to capital. You know, I really admire the way I know the Stripe founders pretty well. And, you know, they're in a really unique position. I respect what they're doing. I think we'll probably take the more traditional path, though it's far enough in our future. You know, that's just more our philosophy because I think that's where you're going. We don't have reticence to do it eventually, and we'll probably more take this.

traditional path. That makes sense. How do you think about the Sierra fundraising process versus what's happening at OpenAI? Is it just so much simpler to underwrite this business? Have you learned? It doesn't feel like it's just add a couple more zeros. Like the open AI stuff, it seems deeply complicated. Is it refreshing to have more of a simpler business to underwrite? Or are there at least lessons that you've ported over? Have you learned something from Open AI that you brought back? I'm interested. They're like C-Corp traditional equity financing. It's pretty, it works pretty well. Open eyes are just a really, I mean, it's a one-of-one business, as you all know really well.

The thing that's just so different about building the AGI versus building a apply I company, they're just so different from a capital standpoint. You know, as Sam has articulated better than I could, AGI will fundamentally in some ways be driven by compute and so much of the capital strategy that Sam was articulated is really how can we have the best compute infrastructure and the most resources available for both training and inference especially with these reasoning models and meet the scale of demand there and when you have something that capital intensive it just changes your approach to fundraising partnerships and I really admire you

know what the management team of opening eye is sort of orchestrated there just because i think it's the company that is best positioned to to essentially build the the best computer the largest computer in the world and have the best research team which i think if you're saying what are the ingredients to winning in that market i think they've checked both those boxes in some ways the applied i i'm not sure other founders in the space would agree like i don't think you know we're like an ai company i mean we're using AI to solve business problems but And that's what I love about kind of the whole approach is that we, you know, we talk to a lot of companies that say we're an AI agent company or we're an AI company. And then you look, you ask a few questions and you realize like you're building enterprise software. There's a bunch of things. There's a bunch of things that. And there's nothing bad about that. We love enterprise SaaS more than anyone. But, you know, if you forget that and you get fixated on, you know, we're building, you know, we're just building agents. It's like you're going to just, you're customers will eventually ask you for a feature set that looks like traditional software,

although maybe it's a different work for it. Or you might burn 20 million of capital training a model because it makes you cool at a San Francisco cocktail party and lose sight of why your customers are hiring you to do the job that you're doing. And so, you know, to some degree, as you said, we're unashamed of being an enterprise software company. And more than that, you know, I think the way we invest our capital is very different. Thank you. Thank you. How do you, what's your framework for understanding SaaS companies in the public markets today?

What percentage do you think will be? It feels like everybody will have to transition at some point from traditional seat-based pricing to value-based pricing. You guys have the benefit of starting out with value-based pricing and saying, how many phone calls do you get? How many individual reps do you have? you know what what percentage of that can we uh you know augment or replace but uh just feels like doing that transition on a on a on you know quarterly reporting cadence feels completely you know

miserable yeah my high level premise is it's easier to transition your technology than it is to transition your business model and it's especially if you're public just because if you just think about, let's say you have your, I'll just pick an ERP company and you have an enterprise license agreement for some number of seats, you know, and or, you know, ITSM or something like that. And then you say, okay, we're going to make an agent to automate 70% of what this platform does. That's easy in theory, but what happens in the next renewal, like in six months? Maybe your AI agent platform isn't quite mature enough to actually, you know, make up for the difference in lost seats. So maybe your sales rep, who's incentivized on increasing

the size of that contract goes and it says, you should buy both. You know, buy the same number of seats and an AI agent. And all of a sudden, the CFO of that company is like, wait, I thought this was supposed to reduce their costs. You know, like, what's going out here? And so I think the, I think all these incumbent SaaS companies have an opportunity to come out strong in this market. But they have to really transition their business model and their technology model at the same time. And anyone who says it's easy has never been a public company CEO because it's really hard, you know, because you end up having to tell a story to your investors, to your customers, to your employees. You have to go through a trough of despair, probably. And, you know, if you look

at Microsoft's transition to the cloud and it was really complicated to go from Windows revenue to Azure revenue, now such as, you know, a hero for having done it. But at the time, you know, there's a lot of people including me who wrote them off you know and and then afterwards you're like wow props to them for making that transition and coming out so strongly but for every microsoft there's a siebel systems who didn't make a transition you know and for those of you online you don't know seable that was the company that that sales force beat in the transition to the cloud and and now you probably don't know their name because you know they they didn't sort of make it through that that transition despite being the market leader in the on-premises software era so you know

I think all these companies have an opportunity, and I think that it really takes leadership. I think it's very hard to do as a public company just because it's very hard for investors to sort of see through the quarterly earnings to see because you can, it's just hard. It's just like, is this company mid transition to something great or are they just dying? You know, like it's easy. It's like, and a lot of it, a lot of it is ambition and storytelling. And so it's just a complicated time and software. I think it's really going to come down to leadership,

both like stakeholder management and technology leadership for companies to make this transition. Are you getting a bunch of calls yet from AI application companies that haven't found product market fit and need to find a soft landing? Or do you think that's a few more quarters out because those companies are still well capitalized? We are.

There's definitely, you know, just given the amount, of revenue growth for the ones that are working, it's pretty clear the ones that aren't. There's some good teams and good technology there, too. So we try to look if it makes sunset at all of them, if there's a good team that could contribute. When did that start? About six months ago. Okay. Yeah. What's your, yeah, I assume it will accelerate. Yeah, we're having Hammond from General Catalyst on the show Friday. What's your reaction to his sort of a hot take. I don't know how much it was taken out of context, but this idea that triple, triple, double, double, double, is kind of dead. You need to be 10xing every day.

You're not interesting unless you're 10xing. Is there something there where like the power law is getting steeper? There's a, there are more winter take all markets, more faster growth companies, but then also just some that are, you know, triple, triple, but then going to be nothing. Yeah. So I have a complicated opinion on this one. So first I'll say the faster you grow is sometimes correlated with a lack of a moat just because what enabled you to grow fast might enable your future competitors to grow there as well. You see this in some social services as well. You know, you'll have these social services grow from zero to whatever million users overnight based on a social mechanic and very few. of those have ended up durable. Some of them ended up incredibly valuable like TikTok, but there's like, you know, the clubhouse is the world. Yeah, but TikTok also spent like billions of dollars on user acquisition. Exactly. Exactly. In enterprise, I do think that growth is greater in agents, in part just because there's more value in agents than there is in software,

because you're, you know, essentially doing things like that people were doing before. So you're just achieving more valuable outcomes than just slight productivity enhancement. The reason I'm cautious on it is I think growth can sometimes be artificial, you know, so you can basically juice the numbers. And the question is, are you creating a durable business? And, you know, we talk a lot about, like, in our board meeting, it's just about first mover matters and there's definitely like a green field right now. But what matters is where you are 10 years from now.

So like, are you creating a machine to make happy customers at scale? And so many of these businesses can grow to like, you know, 50 or maybe even 100 million in an ARR and plateau. And you sell this with a lot of different businesses, actually. I mean, it was, and so the question is, what is your addressable market? What are your product advantages? What are your go-to-market motion?

And can you scale to add to the next zero? Can you grow to the next order of magnitude? And the only reason I think he's a smart, I thought it was a smart point that growth has definitely accelerated in this world of agents. But as an investor in particular, you're really worried about can they get a billion in revenue, can they get 10 billion

in revenue. And it turns out that like growing really fast to 20 million is like loosely correlated with that. You know, it certainly means there's product market fit. But the question is like, was it with a very small niche of startups? Or selling tokens at a loss. Yes, exactly. Subsidizing it, right? Yeah. So I'm a huge believer in quality annual recurring revenue and very happy customers. And my view is if you can do that quickly like we have, that's great. If you had someone growing more slowly, but it was very high quality revenue from very happy customers. I'd probably bet on them over just the fast growth rate, because to me, that's a more durable business over time. Do you think just raw execution can be a moat? Because some of those things you were saying

earlier, it's not like you guys have access to different LLMs that someone else in your category might not, but it's just this kind of like know-how of selling into the enterprise and being able to do that at you know just with with pure excellence that feels like it's separated you guys from I'll say it's a I think it's I think it's all the above you want the best technology best product best go to market but I think right now because the technology is changing so fast execution compounds over time you know so if you had a great product today but you weren't executing well you will not have the best product a year from now so that's where I think execution is maybe the main thing we focus on because it's basically the pace of innovation in your product and the pace of reaching and making new customers successful.

And we want to have the best pace because I think what we want to, if I come on this show a year from now, I want to be farther ahead of our competitors than we are now. And that is all a function of execution. Last question I have. I know we're a few minutes over. So hopefully you don't have to jump. But how are you thinking about the evolution of the cloud market broadly? you have companies like Oracle

waking up and getting extremely aggressive. You also have a bunch of neoclouds. I'm sure all of these different players are calling you every day. Hopefully not sending you AI, chat GPT generated cold emails. But I'm curious, like,

you know, where you expect to be and what kind of vendors you expect to be using on that side over the next five, ten years. Yeah, the Oracle story is pretty incredible, isn't it? I don't like, who would have predicted what's your backlog if you were going to use you it's amazing well it's really impressive too just because it sort of shows you you know sort of like a founder driven big

view of the market it's super impressive and and I just like kind of I just I love stories like that just because it's like just I mentioned the Microsoft story where so many of us had written them off and like it's just super impressive the level of execution and clarity that Larry brings that business. You know, broadly, I think the things that's changed in cloud is just the shortage of supply of GPUs and the demand for compute. And I think that is bringing a lot of, you know, there's a geopolitical angle, too, where are these data centers built, data sovereignty, all of that as well. So I think we're in this new era of cloud infrastructure where, you know, the CAPX is getting larger. You're seeing like the market crediting boldness in a lot of ways,

because if there's truly a scarcity here, you know, and I think Sam has been articulating, you know, it's like whoever has the best infrastructure will really contribute to this world of AI in different ways. And so I do think we're definitely in a new chapter there just because it's like, you know, different players are making different bold bets. And one of the things that's been really fun to be involved with Open AI

is just seeing sort of Open AI's influence on that as we try to, you know, pursue our mission of ensuring AGI benefits to humanity, And a huge part of that is related to cloud, right? If you don't have the right computer, you're not going to achieve that mission. Makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much, sir. We took you a couple of minutes over.

Congratulations, and we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, thanks for having me. Cheers. I'll see your rest of your day. Let me tell you about graphite.com code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. We are joined by Joe Lonsdale next. We are going to welcome him from the re-stream waiting room into the team.

be an ultra-dome. Joe, how are you doing? Look at that audio video quality. You look fantastic. How you doing? You look younger than ever. You're aging in reverse. The camera is helping as well. The six young kids, I guess, are keeping me young running around with him. I won a half-year-old was your competition for this. He was angry. I wouldn't drive him in the car. A little baby car. Do you have the most kids of any, you know, top GP? Anybody got you beat that you know? Six is I'm sure, I'm sure if some have more. I probably, you know, my wife and I are pretty traditional, so just with her, which makes it tougher to go to two eyes.

We're going to get there eventually. I wanted to ask you about this, uh, Trey Stevens post. He said he found a Palantir branded iPod Touch, Generation 2 that he had custom engraved back in 2009 while digging through a box at my house. Did you get one of these? Do you know the story of this?

Is this a Trey Stevens exclusive? iPod Touch from 2009, actually I, I, I have a lot of early Palantir kind of gear. Mostly I had these giant things we used to carry around, like these big computers and whatever their cases are called. Usually for guns, but use them for computers. I'm not sure about the iPod. The Pelican case. You probably

had a Pelican case. There's like the really serious ones. And I, the very first time I brought it to D.C., we had a rental car. It was like 2005. And I went to the address. We were going to stay at. And then there's this very nice black man. He's like, you boys are on the wrong part of town. And I'm like, oh, what's this northwest, southwest thing?

You know, so if you know, D.C. What was it like early in the Palantir Days? Gary Tan tells the story about you're not selling holiday in software. You've got to stay at Four Seasons. I forget exactly what hotel chains he mentioned. Is that apocryphal? Is that true when you traveled for business? Would you stay at the top-tier place?

I think the very top of the company would stay at, like, relatively nice places. We weren't upgrading to the nice rooms, but it's probably like $6,700 versus $200. a night sort of thing, which, you know, in retrospect, I think there's multiple ways of running a company. I do think when you're meeting important people, you had to make sure you're not meeting them with the holiday, and that would probably not be a good idea for trying to network with the very top people in these contexts. So I think that's, listen, I think a lot of people waste too much money when they're starting companies, so I don't want to set

a bad example. I was actually a top trader at Peters Fund, and then I brought on my friends to like start this with me, because a lot of them I brought on to the hedge fund, and it turns out they didn't really like finances, so we ended up building out this company. And the fund, part of our comp was that you can basically spend whatever money you want if you were one of the top guys there. So it was like a very kind of bad place for me to start from in terms of being spoiled already. We have to be honest here. Thank you for being honest.

Where should we start? There's a bunch of stuff. I mean, we were just talking to Brett Taylor about this Hamon over at General Catalyst was saying that, like, the world has changed, triple, triple, double, double, double, for revenue growth is no longer interesting. The only thing that's interesting is 10xing revenue every year, something crazy. The power law is getting steeper. I would love your take on just what it takes to be interesting as a startup in the era of AI,

where if you are in the right market or you're indexed to the right thing, or maybe you're selling tokens at a discount, you can get to a crazy revenue run rate very, very fast. What are you watching out for? What are you optimistic about? How does all that play out? I mean, listen, it's definitely a very different world right now because there's so many new possibilities. I think we were looking at something. I want to out the person because I'm not doing it.

But I was looking at something that was like going zero to five this year. And I thought it could easily have gone to at least 15 or 20, if not more next year. But I thought the team was kind of like a BB plus. It wasn't like the very, very best people. And that's just insane. By the way, those two things combined, you can grow that fast with something that was like maybe not the very best people having trouble hiring. And I mean, the bar is just a lot. higher right now and by the way and to be clear that that round will probably get done at

oh yeah like a couple hundred million at least exactly and and i'm pretty sure it will and it's like it's yeah it's like it's like it also raises the bar for everything else like we were looking at this really cool thing in bio infrastructure that could be very important for the future of humanity and for what it could do in the bio world and it's just going to take three or four years and these things in bio as you know are just hard and it's like you know what even though this is so important like we we have to, on the margin, you have to be in like the green fields right now. The very, very top AI teams are just so far ahead of everyone. So, you know, I do think there's like, I mean, what Hamas says is to me, it's not as

much about like exactly the metrics. I think, I think some people like live in metrics and they should and my, my, one of my partners does too. And, you know, my view tends to be like who are the very best talent in the world, who has the very best cultures. I mean, you see something like cognition with, you know, 20 gold medal winners or whatever, Scott used to work for me to add a part after winning, you know, programming, you know, competition globally three times in a row. And like, like, obviously that's

like the extreme. But the extreme works in AI, right? It's like, so I think for me, it's more about like, what is the very best talent? And then let's build something that no one else can build. And of course, yes, if it works, it's going to, it's going to grow insane speeds. Tell me the story of finding Scott, identifying him, recruiting him. It seems like one of the greatest talent acquisitions of all time. You've developed a business relationship over a long time now. How did you even think to back him early, work with him early, any of that? I mean, to be honest, to be honest, like, Scott is a really special and amazing person, but, you know, I hired most of the first 200 people at Palantir.

Atapar had eight kind of gold medal winners along with Scott, who came in at the same time with my friend Vlad Novakoski was helping me at the time, an amazing guy as well. Just give away all my secrets here, if we're going to go get his help now. But, you know, I've got to hide some of these names from you guys. It's dangerous. But, but, you know, and then Scott was one of eight that year. And I think another one of them was Alex from Scale, and he was an intern there too. And, you know, it was actually very funny.

I mean, both amazing people. I think Alex left in a way where we didn't stay as close. And Scott left away where we did stay a little bit closer. But even Scott, I think he was running around the world. And I'd been in touch. I actually invested in his new thing after that, which was not cognition, which is a little bit because I thought it was a terrible idea. By the way, this is a very good idea when you have the smartest people.

in the world you should invest in their terrible ideas just as a sidebar we went back to 2022 and we met these people who were doing something really dumb and like we kind of want to give money anyway and we didn't it was out of MIT and it ended up pivoting into cursor there's other people there's another one where it's like i have this chain from yesterday where cole my partner like forged it to me and it's like these guys are really good they're raising seven million at like 40 posts it's 22 and i'm like oh god it's just we all think it's a dumb idea i'm like we can't We can't keep doing dumb ideas, guys. And it turns out they pivoted, and they're raising a $5 billion post right now.

I'm like, oh, God, we just need to give smart people money. It's just like, oh, what you have to do is so annoying. But, yeah, there's like the bell curve. It's like, you know, I'm one end just give smart people money on the other end, give smart people money. And in the middle, it's like, oh, what's the idea? What's the attraction? Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Just like, even though it's like actively a bad idea, like give them money. And by the way, even the thing that was a bad idea, like, but he's doing a glad now or Vlad's in charge now that and he's pivoted to something it's working it's probably it's also a unicorn so it's like they figured it out so it's just the same like it's just all about talent and so I lost us touch with Scott a little bit and they got back in touch with them and fortunately I've been in the last few rounds of cognition I wish I wish I'd say it as his best friend it's hard to keep in touch with all the smart people you admire flying around when we're busy but it's he's someone I really enjoyed getting to know

and he's someone he's really grown as a leader more than I expected sometimes you know people when they're like 18 19 20 21 and and you get one impression of them and and you get one impression of them And you're so impressed, but, like, was not, like, the leader personality. And now he's just such, like, a fierce leader personality plus, you know, the global champion thing. So, that's pretty amazing. He's doing, he's doing good to work. Yeah, we read a Wall Street Journal article about the latest IMO gold medalists. And I was surprised because I was texting with a GP at a big fund.

And they were not tracking it. They were not, our joke on the show was like every single one of these kids mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article that beat both deep mind and, Open AI and got the full score on the IMO, they're going to be getting term sheets, but people weren't tracking it as closely. Yeah, it seems like when you were hiring, you know, these IMO winning folks back with Atapar and maybe a Palantir, the meta at the time was like you want to invest in the kid who's like sleeping on a mattress on their floor, like sleeping in a closet in San Francisco. Maybe it was like somewhat of a near, like a different, different track then, even though you can see it becoming consensus now because Scott has shown.

No, it's Scott and Alex and a few others. But listen, I don't think there's too much alpha left in that in the sense that when you have all these people at open AI and anthropic and they've raised infinite amounts of money, like, you know, it was a problem for me in Palantir in 2008, 2009 when meta and Google, it doesn't even call it at the time, started giving 100K bonuses to these kids out of the top schools because we had like a monopoly. on just the playbook for the top 20 universities. And they started just like giving a like 100K bonus. That's insane. And like now it's literally like 100 times that. And for these. I mean, there's maybe there is some alpha.

I'm not going to tell you all my secrets in this show. And they're required to. You tell me, I don't know. Oh, you are required to. But it's like, but it's like, I don't think. If you want to tell every investor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell everyone.

No, you can text us after the fact, the real secrets. All right, all right. And we'll keep in private. How are you, how are you thinking about? about, you know, you've obviously had numerous plays in traditional enterprise software. It feels like a lot of public SaaS today has this challenge of transitioning from, you know,

the traditional seat-based model to something more like Palantir, the sort of like value-based pricing. How are you think, you know, are you just bearish on public SaaS broadly? Do you think some of them are going to be able to transition? Brett Taylor just said, it's easier to, you know, do a transition your turn? tech, your tech, than your business model, especially in the public markets.

It's so funny to live in this world, because it's like I woke up in opposite land where I was like, people just beat this shit out of me for like a decade for doing the wrong thing, the wrong model. And suddenly, suddenly like, how could everyone do that model? That's great, I guess. I don't, I don't actually know if everyone needs to do a change in model overall. I guess I think the more interesting question is like, which of these SaaS companies own? important infrastructure and workflows that are juxtaposed to other value they can capture with AI and then also still has a technical culture to do that so this is like a motion at a par I'm working on really hard as an example I started

at a par 15 years ago it has over eight trillion dollars in the platform the core infrastructure business is still growing infrastructure SaaS business is still growing at like you know 25 plus percent just that core and there's all these things on top of it starting to grow because it just touches everything when it provides value for wealth managers and so like I think to get that business growing 40 or even 50% potentially, it has to, like, build really strong AI teams and workflows that take advantage of where it is. And I think there's going to be a bunch of SaaS companies that do figure this out in the next few years. And those are going to be

really valuable companies. And then the ones that don't figure it out at all, there's probably some danger that they even lose the mode of their core thing to begin with because it's going to be too easy to copy or something if they're not, if they're not like scaling it. So I think, I again, think it's like a power law thing where some of these are actually worth a lot more. And then most of them don't have the talent to do it. Yeah. It's been fascinating watching the narrative shift from the foundation model companies are going to eat everything to the foundation model is going to commoditize. There'll be a couple application layer companies to the idea that AI would be sustaining in enterprise SaaS because you actually,

even if you have a semi-technical culture, you don't need to train a foundation model. You can just go grab an open AI API and implement that. But there's this business model tension now. And if you're stuck in your business model, there's going to be a lot of startups that are counterpositioning against you and you're going to be kind of screwed. How are you thinking about it? It's interesting, because I do think if you own the customer really well, you could add these things much really easily, but you're going to have to go faster.

The startups are going to eat it away. There's so many areas where we're kind of seeing this right now. Or the system of record or some sort of data some sort of relationship. This is right, like So Kotra as a company. I mean, it's like a great system of record for the insurance space. And it took a long time to build.

It's a bunch of Palantier talent. They're really coming into their own system of record now, which is very slow. And then they're trying to add the AI in before all the new AI things that people funding and it's I think it's pretty interesting I think that's just a record has a very good chance of winning but that's a question yeah how are you thinking about macro broadly I feel like everybody's I mean every asset all-time highs gold bitcoin the I like I like the I like the

meme I like the mean that says printer is coming with anyone dressed up as Lord Stark of the north yeah but for your angle is probably generally better use of your time to like think about, you know, the opportunities at the early stage today, you could incubate a company, you could fund a company. What is the world? I am incubating a lot. Listen, I started incubating a lot more in 2021, partially because I was just so annoyed that everything was like insanely unreasonably expensive. And you kind of have a monopoly on the first couple rounds, right? Is the, yeah, we probably were too generous letting friends in. I'm always just like, I have these business friends who were just like much more hardcore than me and just like, just like very sharp elbows and kind of even

a little bit nasty. And I tend to like just like to everyone around me to make money. So I probably should have taken just only myself the first two rounds. That's especially Seronic. I should have done that. But whatever. It's fun to start things that are important for the country and that win and we make enough money for everyone. But no, we do do the whole like big first round ourselves now just because that's the right thing I do for the fund and then like do a lot of the second round. And listen, I think building is still the best. I mean, even right now today, you guys tell me I'm seeing AI rounds where like I'm really happy if I get 15% and it. And it's just I think building is still the best. I mean, even right now today, you guys tell me I'm seeing AI rounds where like I'm really happy if I get 15% and it. And Series A of a really hot AI company right now. I think I got 16% something the other day by overpaying. I think it was the right thing to do. And it's like, but I mean, I've seen a lot of things where I get 5% or 6%. We just talked to Brett Taylor. He raised $350 million, a $10 billion valuation. Like that's not a lot of dilution.

It's going to be hard to build a huge position in that company. And that's a one-year-old company. Like, and these are happening all the time. I mean, he's special, but yeah, it's still a unique situation. There's a special, the specialist ones I only have two or three percent. I'm really happy because I think they could be 100 billion. in all our companies. Yeah, exactly.

It's very weird. It's different than it was. Talk to me about the early stage startup market in Texas. Obviously, you were in San Francisco for a long time. buddies with Gary Tan, coworkers at some point. Gary's leading a revitalization of Y Combinator. Is there something adjacent? Like if I wanted to go talk to 50 young people building startups, the next up in Texas,

like where would I go? who would I be talking to? So, and I've been fighting for California to fix itself for a long time. Gary's an old friend, obviously, from our fraternity days through Palantir, and I think he's come more to my point of view on these things, but I really appreciate. He's doing a good job. He used to argue a lot.

You know, there's a lot of history there. He's did, Gary's crushing it. The thing about Texas, there's a few things. I'd say, if you want to build, like, the very top AI startup in the cloud, application layer, model, whatever, like doing something really hard new there, you probably should be in San Francisco today. Like, that's just where the talent is.

It's a very strong network effect. I would love it if it wasn't, but it is. And it's there. So what do you do in Texas? Well, I think we have, like, admission seronic earlier, I think if you're building in the land of atoms, if you're manufacturing,

I think that's probably the most important company in the country for the U.S. Navy, as well as doing very hard things in robotics, very hard things in software around it, as applies to defense, we do have, like, you know, 10 or 15 of the very best AI software people for that there. So I think what you're seeing in Texas is it's a really good place to manufacture. You have a lot of the best people, like a boring company, a lot of the top SpaceX talent. Others are coming out here.

I think you have a lot of things that go really deep in health care here. Obviously, M.D. Anderson in Texas is one of the probably the best cancer center of the country alongside Memorial Sloan and New York. And you have just a lot of other really deep kind of health care research, healthcare services groups, healthcare services, there's multiple, multi-billion dollar new companies in healthcare here, there. And I do think like, like when I was talking, Reid Hoffman, I was trolling because we have different politics. Like, where do you test your like self-driving trucks? And of course, you test them in Texas. I mean, if you're trying to like do things, you know, if I'm trying to like automate, one of our companies that I'm really bullish on is a bunch of ex-Wamo guys

and they're automating construction with excavators and they're going to like automatically run all sorts of construction and quarries and other things. And of course they're doing it in Texas. So Texas is just like a great center for industry, for building things in the real world, for robotics talent, for defense talent, for health care talent. It has great AI talent, but it's not going to compete with like the next new AI models in San Francisco. San Francisco right now is just obviously an awesome place for investing for that type of stuff. My current like understanding of the startup like micro worlds is that you're still probably going to be doing a road show on Sand Hill Road or in San Francisco. when you're later stage, you're going to be talking to crossover funds in New York.

You're going to be in D.C. if there's a lobbying component. But then you're going to need to build your company wherever makes sense. And for certain industries, Texas makes a ton of sense. For a lot of things in the real world, a lot of things in health care, Texas is by far the best place to do it. I love you can go to the government. It's not like they agree with me on everything, but you can go to them and you can talk and they're reasonable and they respect you and you go back and forth. And you don't have to be a Republican or Democrat to do it, by the way.

Like, they actually, it's like you can't, they actually care about business succeeding. It's very cool. It's like, it's a new idea to me to have a government that has a group. It's like, wow, how do we help business succeed? It's really great. And then you can get things done and it's reasonable. So I definitely like building things here. Sure.

Without giving away too much alpha or feel people, feel free to put people down the path. Give up all that. But what do you think is the most under-hyped trend adventure right now? Obviously, AI is just drowning everything out, but feels like, could be at the beginnings of a new robotics wave, but how are you seeing it? Yeah, I'm really interested. You say robotics,

I'm really interested in the stuff going on in the real world using AI, which I think is like a whole new area that's still early, but I think it's just like a much bigger part of the economy that people realize. So for example, if you can do a certain part of construction automated with bedrock, I think people don't understand that means you can run a quarry better and there's $100 billion of quarries.

And if you can make quarries, have higher cash flow. That's worth, like, it's worth tens or hundreds of dollars. I mean, it's just like, and there's like so many things like this where the real, like the real economy is like 85% of the capital. And that's all about to be transformed. And I think people underestimate like how much we're going to need in credit to do that, how much, just like, just like how much big stuff's going to happen you can create in the economy in the 2030s there. So, you know, even stuff like boring company and like, and like automating that and making it much, much, much better is obviously using modern AI and other modern technology.

as they iterate with engineers on it. And it's just really impressive how much cheaper you could do things, how much better you could do things. So I think that's under-hypes and misunderstood, just because it takes a couple of years longer to really get out there and start spreading quickly. But I think it's just much bigger than people realize. And that's one of my favorite areas.

I guess the other one, you know, I think in general people spend too much time on like the super giant companies. Like people call them the infinity stories or the things that can be worth trillions. And I talked to some of my friends who are running very big funds and they're really only interested in something that could be worth trillions of dollars and have all the top talent. And it's almost like,

I think one of them is a good guy, but he said to me, I want to be in the room with the powerful people doing the most important things. And I think that's like an instinct of a lot of our top investors right now. And actually, I think there's going to be literally like a thousand, like five to $50 billion companies

and like so many niche application areas that do need to build out the workflow, do you need you to build out the operations, and do you need you to kind of go after different services. of the economy. Yeah, what about it? It feels like, you know, when you look at like Palantir, Atapar, OpenGov,

it feels like you've had a lot of success with companies that were very under, you know, didn't have a ton of, like, crazy hype and did the kind of like behind the scenes heavy lifting to get to the point where you could have a massive outcome or be really critical to an industry. Are you, do you think there's not enough of that? Like, it feels like a lot of, every company gets hyped, you know, incredibly quickly now if they're talent dense and are you still like trying to find opportunities where you can just kind of quietly build in a category for four or five years yeah

i mean i think i am building a bunch of stuff that's not really that hyped right now that's using AI that's that's going to change these different categories and there's this like when you look at the talent out of palanteer's a lot like the talent out of PayPal except on a bigger scale in a lot of ways because palatry have many more years to compound with the very top talent and so you have things like I just like random things like candid is just like apply to I don't know they want me to give their numbers on this show I guess but it's like they're doing they're doing health care billing they're growing really fast they're gonna do you know they're gonna get into the billions of of revenue like within the next few years

probably and and and it's just like just like I guess it you know it's a 280 billion dollar space and there's not that much hype around it and it's just like wow this is like this could be absolutely this could be like a hundred billion dollar company in the early 2030s and and almost no one will have heard of it and it's It's like, there's just so much stuff like that right now, which is pretty fun. So, I mean, I think I'm really bad at hype. I think Palantir eventually got hyped, like, despite us being bad at it, which is like people.

Well, yeah, I'd say like seronics, an example of something that, you know, got a ton of hype, ton of capital, a ton of attention really quickly. That, that, that did. I think we did get a lot of the right talent and we were kind of the right place, right time where there's no one else who was doing this for the Navy and had like, and no one else who had like that density of, of talent and operational like dina's just such an amazing and such a fast CEO and he brought in kind kind of other co-founders who were also really top people so I think like andral they just had so

many of the best people right place right time going hard so I guess that got hyped earlier and I would have expected that's fair but but most of the things I'm doing are not like that yeah that makes sense do you think there's any positive knock on effects of the insane capax that's going into the AI foundation model world like we saw sam allman say he's going to build 10 gigawatts mark Zuckerberg saying he's doing a gigawatt. Elon just did Colossus 2. It's a gigawatt. And the interesting thing to me is like

this is in some ways like the, like, you know, Seronic Palantir, and Earl, SpaceX. Those are American dynamism companies. But if you were talking about re-industrialization and just making big things in America, doing stuff that requires government approval, like Elon's

like Colossus 2 across three different states, like that feels like that unblock some crazy stuff. And then it's going to be easier to work on health care or work on automated truck. This is very, very good. No, you're 100% right. Whether or not it's a bubble and whether or not they should be investing this much money,

I'm not even going to comment on because I think it's just like really good for America that they're like practicing, building these things at this scale. You're 100% right. They have to fix some of the permitting stuff. They have to create all this infrastructure we can use now for advanced manufacturing. We can use the advancements to make things cheaper to do at scale for building related things in America. We're going to build a ton of stuff on top of this. I mean, for me, I just love it because I talk about the different levels of AI investing where it's like zero is energy

infrastructure. One is chips. Two is data centers. Three is the models. Four software infrastructure. Five is apps and services. And like I'm mostly doing things at five and some four. But by people doing all those stuff at the bottom with insane amounts of money, that makes my life very easy. It makes everyone else's life easy too. So this is great for America. Yeah. For so long, we've heard like, oh, America, we can't respond to DJI, GoPro got roasted. Oh, we can't respond to unitary. Maybe Elon will figure it out. And it's like, I feel like we're getting close to like, no, you can actually marshal $10 billion

of capital, set up a massive facility in a couple months and get approvals and do the thing that you need to do to build a ton of stuff in America. I think this is really, really good. I'd love to see a wave like this for bio in the next decade as well because right now our bioregulatory apparatus is completely effed up. There's been some really strong hit pieces in the journal recently or some huge messes there. but it's the same sort of thing where if you could take this energy, apply to that infrastructure and, you know, hopefully apply some breakthroughs we're going to see there to own it.

Like, like, but the fact that America can still do this, these companies can still do this, it's awesome and it makes us very bullish. Yeah. You had a pretty viral post yesterday responding to Nick Huber, who was taking shots at the great citizens of Austin. He's going after Austin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and it turns out the photo was from like after. school ended so like very clearly i'd see i could totally tell it was a joke photo yeah yeah but but i wanted to ask something you said sorry nick many but many of these people relaxing in the nice weather in our hometown are the spouses mistresses and children where did you where did you get number two number two there where did that come from he was trying to his whole post was like these people are lazy i'm going to outsource them for five dollar an hour jobs to the philippines and and it was like an anti-american kind of like negative post and then so my clap back is actually our U.S. employees are so wealthy and so successful and I built

things so much bigger than anything you're doing that they can afford to have their families relaxing and and mr. said the joke the joke of mistresses is they're so wealthy that maybe they have mistresses they're just relaxing in the sun while they're working because they're creating so much wealth we don't need to outsource to throw a rolled slop we can we can have great wealth in this country and great success and don't make fun of my city so it was it was obviously a joke but some people some people got really sensitive about that so Your masterful poster. Yeah, you used his own tricks against it.

You did, you did. I was a strong ratio. I appreciate it. It was like, it was a Jewish New Year. And I was like stepping out of the synagogue service. And I was just like, I probably should have stayed in a synagogue and been on my phone. It's not been on my phone. So it's dangerous when you give me like a little bit too much free time on a day.

It's dangerous. Oh, yeah. Well, never stop posting. Never log off, Joe. We enjoy your posting. We've enjoyed your appearance. thank you so much. Yeah, I would actually like, I think X would like it broadly. If every time Nick Huber posted, you just quoted it and dumped on him, because he's always

leaving something open. Oh, yeah. I worry I hurt him, because he like has these really angry replies. And I was, I thought it was kind of a joke slapback, but I think he was like pretty offended. So if he's listening, I didn't mean to be offensive. I appreciate his hustle porn, even though I disagree with attacking America. He, he knows what he's doing. He's getting in the arena. It's purely, it's just, he's rolling around in the mud. He's going to get a little All right. It's going to happen. But thank you so much for taking the time.

Come back on any time. You see you guys. Good time. Have fun hanging with your kids. We'll talk to you soon, Joe. All right. Have a great rest of you. Let me tell you about Julius.

a.I. What analysis do you want to run chat with your data and get expert at level insights in seconds? Loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG. Zapier. I got the name right this time. Did you see the car heart jacket that

Turner Novak says, if a VC shows up to the meeting wearing this, you should sign the term sheet immediately. This is a callback? Didn't Bain Capital do a Carhart collab for merch? And they got some backlash from that. Sol and Valor allegations. VCs keep it in the, I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting on a suit. You saw Joe Lonsdale just came on the show in a beautiful suit.

Nothing wrong with a suit. What's the, with the Patagonia Vass? That's very iconic VC attire. You throw on the, this looks like Han Solo. This jacket looks like something Hans Solo would wear. It looks good, though. Anyway, in other news, YouTube restored some suspended accounts. Ben Thompson has been breaking it down.

He said that he gave kudos to the information for their headline, which is YouTube to re-allow accounts banned over COVID-19 integrity election violations. And Ben says this stands in marked contrast to other headlines that characterize it as people who spread COVID misinformation. And he's quoting the verge on that case. And he says, it's true that there's some misinformation, but there's no question that not just legitimate, but in retrospect, true content was censored.

And its creators kicked off the platform. Google, in that letter to Jordan, who is a Republican legislator, said that they placed the blame squarely on the Biden administration. Google is saying the Biden administration twisted their arm. And so this obviously goes back to the discussion about what happening with Jim and Kimmel. What is the role of the government in free speech? I think it's that the government shouldn't be involved at all, actually,

and that no government should be involved in this stuff. There's been debate over what level of involvement was in. Find one person that didn't spread at least a little misinformation during that era, right? whether you're government, whether you're some schizzo's conspiracy theorists, right? Everybody was... And that's what makes America great, is that during the COVID era, we were suffering through the same pandemic that China was suffering through, but we, you know, supposedly had free speech, and so we could talk about it and throw out crazy ideas and pitch all sorts of different solutions and debate them in the great online marketplace of ideas. And so this seems like a positive, a positive shift. You know, more speech is probably better. More free speech is probably better. Ben says his concern on strategore is more narrow,

and that is how tech companies should have approached challenges like these over the past years and how he hopes they approach them in the future. And so he says Google and YouTube were obviously not the only tech companies under pressure during the COVID era. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the same thing a year ago. Another was Spotify and Joe Rogan, which Ben wrote about at the time. And he got a lot of angry responses to his take on how Spotify should have handled the Joe Rogan situation and the pressure on Joe Rogan during the COVID pandemic. And Ben says, but I think in the revelations of the intervening years, and I might add, a lot of those headlines I complain about above prove my point.

And most disturbingly, we have just this month seen some of the most discouraging and devastating consequences of losing the cultural value of free speech. Still, that wasn't the part of that update. Rather, I was writing directly to EC and other tech CEOs declaring an adherence to free speech was not a get-out-of-jail-free card in terms of avoiding criticism for content hosted on your platform. And in that light today, I don't have so much advice as I have an exhortation. Tech platforms need to lead the way in re-establishing the cultural mores around free speech and not just to get there, get-out-of-jail-free card back. Tech is dominant culturally in a way it wasn't when the cultural mores around free speech were established, of course, centuries ago, and the most generous interpretation of their actions over the last decade is that they were afraid to assert their power, bowing to the wishes of the loudest voices in the media and in their own companies. In fact, the best way to avoid partisanship is to be the natural arbiter of all the platforms say they want to be is to decline to take positions on all issues. But one, the importance of free expression. That is the key enabler of finding a path forward on all those other issues

and is the foundation of a free society. That, in a nutshell, has been Straterey's approach to politics, and it has served me well. I think it would scale just as well to the largest companies in the world. He says, take a page out of my book. It's working for me. Page out of the First Amendment. Page out of the First Amendment, potentially the first page.

The first page of the list of amendments. Did you see this post from Lachlan Phillips? He said, I did. This is Coogan thought. The most toxic trait is a belief that instead of jailing Elizabeth Holmes, she should have been placed, we should have placed her under YC arrest under the watchful supervision of Gary Tan

and forced her to rebuild and rebuild her device over and over again like Iron Man for the next 11 years or until she gets it working. I love it. And this is what you wanted to see. instead of the kind of shit posting that she's doing, it'd be great if she was like, guys, I'm figuring out kind of what went wrong. Yes. Before, here's a more narrow solution that we could kind of create.

Yes. I mean, it doesn't even need to be, I mean, I understand that from prison, you are not going to be able to build a device that tests your blood. She's just not going to have the equipment for that. But she could be reading papers. She could be reading the analysis and giving thoughts that over time could look very good. Like you see it today with the news of Donald Trump and RFK are talking about Tylenol that's being hotly debated. The administration is taking one position.

Different media figures and health experts are taking different positions. I'm sure Andrew Huberman will comment on it at some point. But like she has the opportunity to read all the research, comment on it. And then we will see in a year or two or maybe more how those predictions panned out. And that's what we've been seeing with Martin Screlli, where he has made a bunch of bets on, he's very bearish on quantum computing right now. We'll see what happens. We just get to wait.

And we will remember, wow, he was correct about his bare call on quantum computing. And so that updates us to think that he is an interesting thinker on the valuation of new technology companies. whereas right now she's kind of just like leaning into this character of oh wow she's posting from prison i think that novelty will wear off i think that novelty will wear off and will want to see something more meaningful i mean it's definitely broadly change people's like general feelings towards her for sure for sure so for sure anyway fall generative media platform for developers the world's best generative image video and audio models all in one place develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

Head over to tbpn.com slash sounds, which is brought to you by fall. Printer is coming. Amit is investing, rights from Bessent. We are going into an easing cycle and we'll see a massive decrease in mortgage rates. Powell should have signaled 100 to 150 basis points of cuts, not just 75 points. We'll begin Fed candidate interviews next week, looking for someone with an open mind. Looking for someone with an open mind. Open mind to low interest.

To what we want. Potentially, we'll see. I would love to see mortgage rates come down. I would love to see the cost of housing come down. I still feel like the opportunity is probably in just building more housing, building a lot more. But certainly... Love when the rates are low, hate when they're high. It certainly helps.

But, of course, that tenure isn't really behaving. Yeah. It's got to whip it into shape. Jim, Jim Kramer with that 10 year, better start behaving. That's great. There is a fantastic profile on Jim Kramer in the news today. We should take a gander through this because it's a fun one. This was brought to my attention from, let me find it, from Joe Wisenthall.

He says, great profile and business insider of a guy who was on the Odd Lots podcast who wakes up at insane hours every day to cover the markets. Did you see this? So Jim Kramer is a busy man, the mad money host, known for his emphatic delivery and bold stock calls on the air gave a rundown of his hectic schedule when speaking on Bloomberg Oddlots podcast last Monday. Here were the highlights of his routine and get ready to be mogged, Jordie. He wakes up. He kicks off his day at 3.15 a.m. Do you know what time he goes to bed? Six. 11 p.m. He gets four hours of sleep a night. Just doesn't need to sleep. Does he nap?

There's no competing with this guy. This is a insane. We try so hard. I feel like we do a really good job, but we're putting up eight hours of sleep a night. How did you sleep last night? Go to 8Sleep.com. Get a T, get a pod five ultra. 30-night risk free trial. I wish that I could. I got a 96 last night, but I slept for seven hours and 41 minutes. That's about four hours more than Jim Kramer slept. I got a 90, seven hours, 23 minutes. Ooh, I win again. You win again. Yeah, I just, I guess I got to go to bed. So Kramer wakes up at 3.15 a.m. The first 45 minutes of his day are on, quote, a tight schedule due to his 4 a.m. workout. We're getting into the gym at 6.30 at best. He's getting in two and a half hours ahead of us. And he's on East Coast time. This man lives in the future compared to us. It's remarkable. Before the hour, he brushes up on the market by perusing the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. I get two of those done. He's doing six. Okay. He's ahead of me there. Kramer also said he sifts through stock research

in his inbox combing through about 700 emails a day That's remarkable I read everything I think is relevant I'm looking for something to say I have a memo that comes out 10 things I'm looking at I do one thing I'm looking at he does 10 I try and just do the current thing And he's got 10 of them

He's an absolutely An absolute beast Kramer said referring to his weekly weekday morning newsletter For CNBC's Investing Club He said so that's my overlord He referred to the newsletter as. I'm starting to feel that the newsletter is my overlord. I respect it. Go subscribe.tbPN.com. Throw your email in there. You will get the

TBPN run of show every week, the current thing, my newsletter. Then Kramer appears on CNBC's squawk on the street, begins writing Mad Money, his flagship show on the network in the mid-morning. Throughout the day, Kramer spends a huge amount of time reading up on company news and earnings reports. He finishes taping Mad Money around a quarter six. We saw him there doing that. Zach Meyer in the chat says, this guy. guy does not go to the gym at 4 a.m. Look at him. You think he's lying?

I think it's more like he's not working out for physique, right? He's, I mean, we got to hang a couple weeks ago. We got to hang with Kramer for about 20 minutes. It was the end of the day. He had a ton of energy. He was incredibly locked in. He did have a ton of energy. This was at like probably five or five.

Yeah, he's probably doing something low impact. But I like to imagine him benching three plates, squat in five, throwing up some 200-pound hang cleans, some clean jurors every day, PRs every day, getting aerobic, getting athletic with it. Just throwing on a stringer? He'll fit it, yes, absolutely. Yeah, we get a, get a giga-chad mass monster Kramer photo up ASAP. I need to see that. He finishes taping mad money around a quarter six and comes home. He'll go out to dinner around 10 p.m. and then say good night to his wife before tucking in. Kramer acknowledged that the intensity of a schedule puts a strain on his marriage. I have a great marriage. I put that out first because I wreck it every day.

I go to bed at 11. She goes to bed at like a normal time. So that's where I really, when I really wrecked the marriage. That's not the plan. I didn't set out to do that, he said. Cramer's routine doesn't seem to have much changed. In 2015, he told Business Insider that he followed a similar schedule. He's been saying this. He's been waking up at 3 a.m. tweeting about stocks and puppies in the morning, making a pit stop at the headquarters of the street, which he co-founded in 1996. What an absolute run for Jim Kramer. Anyway, Turbo Puffer. Search every byte, serverless vector in full-text search built from first principles on object storage, fast 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. This little turbo puffer is used by Notion,

linear, cursor, and many more. I want to go through VCs to AI startups. Please take our money in Bloomberg. This is from Kate Clark. She's private jets, box seats, and big checks. Investors are doing whatever it takes to get into top AI deals. Jordy, would you mind reading the first few paragraphs of this article. I'm trying to catch up to this article. It's page 90. Raising venture capital money has been a breeze for Decagon AI. We're all over the place

with the customer service. AI, CX. It's a very hot industry. Decagon's doing well. Finn, our partner, is doing well, and Brett Taylor's doing well, too. Decagons two years old. They're developing artificial intelligence tools for customer service. All four of Decagon's funding rounds,

totaling more than $230 million, were preempted, meaning firms like Andresen Horowitz offered to invest before the company started fundraising. Now, just three months after a round that valued it at $1.5 billion, we have the founders on when they announced that round. Decagon is fielding unsolicited offers at valuations

as high as $5 million. Give it up for unsolicited offers. They're some of the best offers. For Decagon and a few other AI startups, the fundraising script has flipped instead of pitching venture capitalists up and down Sandhill Road. VCs are pitching them,

hoovering them with gifts and favors in hopes of leading their next round. Can you catch us up on the rest of the Senate of Gold? And I want to go into some ideas because I think the VCs aren't thinking big enough. Big enough. We'll get you back in a second. So Jesse Jang, the 28-year-old co-founder, chief executive officer of Decagon, says investors, hoping to back him. I've offered him everything from tickets to Golden Gate Warriors games to an autographed

poster of MMA legend Kabiv Nur Mugammedov. John would not know who Khabib is, but I'm sure many of you do. One investor even folded origami cranes into a mosaic of Decagon's logo and hand-delivered it to the company's San Francisco office with a term sheet hidden inside. Decagon took the deal, so that's a good one that works. Investors are emailing term sheets. They're giving verbal offers. They're inviting founders to sports games. They're inviting founders to race Ferraris, and they're inviting them on private jets.

It says Bennett Siegel, a co-founder of investment firm ASTAR and an early investor in Decagon. What you tend to see is the best companies are getting preempted every round, and the time between rounds is shrinking. The lavish BC overtures are part of a larger Silicon Valley frenzy for AI driven by startups' astonishing revenue growth and investors' belief that these companies can dethrone tech giants. U.S. startups have raised around $200 billion this year so far, according to Pitchbook data, but 41% of that went to just 10. companies highlighting VC's relentless focus on a small group of AI frontrunners like Open AI and Anthropic. Last year, the share of funding that went to the top 10 companies was less than 10%. A few smaller AI startups have also emerged as investor favorites drawing outsized attention in capital. Among the rising group of hot companies, legal startup Harvey, customer service firm Sierra

and coding company cognition, all of which have drawn big offers from VC firms. Any sphere, the maker of AI coding tool cursor has become a central example of the rush to fund newer AI companies. It's kind of funny that... I heard you talking trash, by the way. I do know who Khabib is. He's an athlete. There you go. Nailed it. You know... What else is there to know? What else is there to know? He punches and he... He kicks. He kicks. Does he do kicks? He does kick. He does kicks. He's into kicking? And wrestles. So, um, uh, isn't it? any, this trend of companies having like one name and then the product name being called

something else. Yeah. Any sphere and cursor, windsurf had the same situation, right? Yeah. So there's this story about Decagon. One investor even folded origami cranes into a mosaic of Decagon's logo. I saw a picture of this and I was confused because a Decagon is just a ten-sided shape. And so it's actually like extremely easy to fold something into a Decagon. But I guess they did cranes into the shape of a Decagon or something? Because like, imagine if you're like, oh, I really want to invest in square. I'm going to fold you a square. I'm going to take a piece of paper.

I'm going to turn the term sheet into something square. It's like, I want to see true origami mastery from a VC if you're going to try and preempt around. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think investors should be thinking of it as what is the right kind of effectively bribe at each stage, right? So what's the budget? What's the, what's the math that you should be doing? How much should you put towards the bribe? It's a tip. Yeah, yeah, it's a tip. There's no tax on

tip. It's a tip. Yeah, I don't know, you know. It depends on the round. But if it's really competitive, maybe thinking about putting 10% of the check size and then paying out of your own management fees for some type of experience, right? Yeah. I mean, if you're just paying 10% over, if there's a $300 million round and it's between you and another firm and you just take just 10% over that's not going to hurt your returns like if you win the round

it's going to be you know 10x and so 10x on 300 as opposed to 330 just making just make insane insumption just take the 30 mil all math out buy a McLaren F1 and be like I see you as the next Elon I see you as the next Sam Altman

they drove McLaren F1s you should drive one you should have this car. It's yours. Or keep a, you know, a fleet of supercars at Sandhill and say you can have this from between the A and the B, right? Yeah. So it's, uh, and, and you could have an adverse effect of founders being like, I like this P1. I'm going to, I don't really want to raise my beat. Uh, okay. Dealing it, but in general, I think it should work out. So I think it should be like writing a 250K flyer, why not get a founder, uh, a long weekend at an Amman property of their choice. You know, something, something straightforward.

You just, just a weekend? I feel like a long weekend. A couple weeks. A couple weeks. Like, at least you could do it. I know, but you're getting, you're getting well beyond that, you know, that 10% mark. Two days in Amman is two weeks at a four seasons. Yeah, so I think you kind of going up the ladder.

Yeah, what's next? If I'm trying to win a $20 million Series A, what should I budget for the tip, for the bribe? For the tip. Tip, tip sounds better than bribe. Okay. Yeah, tip. We're sticking with tips. Yeah, it is.

You know, we are coming up into VC tipping season. So founders got to be thinking about what kind of tip makes sense for each person on your cap table. We've talked about this before. But yeah, how can you take it up? How can you take it up a notch? You know, racing Ferraris, private. But I think these like one-time offerings are super weak. Yeah.

You know, it's like race Ferraris for a day. Yeah. That's not that interesting. Founders doing 9-96. They're like, I don't want to go to your racetrack. So I think Buy the racetrack I think the Thermo Club was up for sale

Or a lot of Or saying You can use my jet one time One time One time It should be Here's the full jet The jets should live with you

Until the IPO Tossing the keys Until the IPO Yeah Then you get your own jet Yeah yeah Until you're you're in the position To be able to get your own

Your own Tyler what would get you to sign a term sheet. What would stick out to you if a VC came to you and said, I got to do this deal. Look at this. I think, look at this picture. I like that you're David Senora fan. You have a frame of a photo of him. I think something compatible, like if the founder is doing 996, right? There's this thing, you know, the current vibe is stakes, right? So maybe you buy, you know, kettle farm with very high quality cows, like, you know, Zuck's Island. Zuck has that on his island. Yeah. For sure. Goldrock said I had a VC try to take me hot air ballooning.

That's a wild one. Would you go in a hot air balloon? I would absolutely go in a hot air balloon. Okay. It's extremely aristocratic. Yeah. It's fantastic. I saw a video of a hot air balloon crashing from somebody that took the video inside the hot air balloon.

It was that. It scared you. It wasn't super appealing. Oh, we got Tyler on the big screen now, and we got Senra here on the big screen. That's great. There we go. I feel like that's a skill issue. Skill issue.

Just hit chat, GPT. How do I fly a hot air balloon? Get up to speed. Summarize that for me. Don't make mistakes. And then we got a little inception going here. I like that. That's a good start.

Anyway, profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat. GPT. We reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Maybe that's what the VC firm should do. Get on profound. When founders type in,

who should I raise money from? By building this, show up in chat. I think founders should just ask. I don't want you to just join the board. I want you to actually be, become a BDR at my company for the next two years. Yeah, I mean, you're joking, but like, that's sort of, I've seen that happen with Elon companies, where to win allocation, you're going, not BDR, but recruiting.

So come in and import your entire network. Everyone you know, who's an engineer who could work at this company, come and work basically full time for like a month to, like, really do everything you possibly can. because there's always you write the check and then you're like they hit you with like oh like do you know any software it's very different from being like I'm doing three full time weeks

just actually racking my network actually making calls catching up with everyone who'd be relevant to the most convenient no no no going really deep into the actual into the rolladex does the Hindenburg count as a hot air balloon I don't think so is a dirgeable it was a blimp

but anyway numeral sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance

let numeral about sales tax com Google just killed dingboard you saw this are you familiar with dingboard

yaxine's project they just killed it what do you mean have you seen this of course I know were you a subscriber I was very early on he gave me

I was like no way I deemed him for some reason and he gave me a code I love the product I thought the product was amazing it wasn't it didn't really

work that well on mobile, but it was super cool. You could, like, go in with AI, remove backgrounds, merge images, blend things together. It was a fantastic product. He goes to work for X. How did they kill it? Well, because Google Labs just launched Mix Board, an experimental AI-powered concepting board designed to help you explore, visualize, and refine your ideas powered by our latest image

generation model, of course, Nanobanana. And with Nanobanana and, you know, basically it's not that they kill Dingboard, it's just that they launched a product that is clearly inspired or lives in the same kind of work stream as dingboard where you can remix images, bring things in. Very, very cool product. I would love to see this on an app for sure. I've always, when I'm making images and memes on my phone, I'm always going back and forth between like Photoshop Express and image flip and a few different sites. There's not a lot of stuff. This is a great product and I hope someone, can take it across the finish line. Obviously, Yaxine had to go work at X and now he's working

on robots and stuff. What do you think of Stillers? Stillers. Soda. Ben Stiller's Soda company. I have no idea. Does he have that type of audience that's like ready to rip soda? From Walmart? Yeah, it's interesting. I guess like we were talking to John Chahy about this. Like Ben Stiller's the type of person that could probably call the CEO of Walmart and get a meeting, right? Like he's so famous. If you're a CEO of a big retail chain and you hear Ben Stillers on the line, you're going to take that call, right? So maybe it advances your, you know, distribution quickly. Stillers is also just a great name. I do. That's the name. The name is great. And when I saw it, I was like, oh, that's a cool name. I'll take a Stillers. That's a great name.

Is that related to Ben Stiller? And then I found out it was. So I could see it working. I would love to do a taste test, we'll have to actually see, is the product good? Because if he has great product sense, kind of doesn't, the distribution and the celebrity will take care of itself. Some of the copy is a little millennial coded. Sure. It says made by 100% real human celebrity people. Okay. Yeah, that's a little. And they, and the, the copy on it says, no fake stuff. Hmm. Okay. And, and crowded category. Yeah. just they they're competing with with olipop and what's the other one there's been a huge there's been a huge lineage of trying to find uh make a product that's free of free of sugar free of fat I would say I would

have been incredibly bullish on this company if it launched in 2019 yep but launching into a category that Pepsi's already going to buy they ever want I'm sure coke will eventually I mean I believe Pepsi already has poppy, which was a direct player to... Peppy. Wait, there's Poppy, but then there's also... Pepsi bought Poppy. You could imagine Coke buying Olipop. Yeah.

And then that's, then it's kind of over. But then there's another, there's another company that's a seltzer that's, it's Bubly, Bubly. Do you know Bubly? Bubly, Sparkling Water? Who owns Bubly? Yeah. Well, we should get Ben on the show to talk about Stillers. And we should get Tyler.

But Bubly was incubated by PepsiCo to compete with, like, the spin drifts of the world. And remember the big boom in seltzers? There were a whole bunch of topochiko and a bunch of other products that were really popular in offices in, you know, 2017 corporate offices. People would be drinking LaCroix all day long. Bubly was like their answer to that. I don't know how it actually panned out, but it's kind of interesting. But in much more interesting news, OpenAI, SAP, and Microsoft are launching Open AI for Germany, a partnership to bring Frontier AI to the moment you've all been waiting for.

Germany's public sector through a sovereign, certified cloud environment. We haven't rung the gong enough on this show. Let's ring it for Open AI for Germany. There we go. And you've got to hit it for Claude getting into the Microsoft ecosystem. That also happened. We love it. Well, without further ado, I think we have our next guest, Riley Walls, in the stream waiting room.

Let's bring him in. He has been being a rascal the last 48 hours. Riley, welcome to the show. How you doing? Thank you for having me. The most viral man on X, the current thing. Yeah, take us through the current thing, the current project, what did you build, what inspired it, what's the reception been? Are there GPUs on fire?

Are the servers on fire? Is it staying up? Walk me through it all. Yeah, I was got a project kind of going on. Yesterday's project was I figured out you could scrape the parking ticket system in San Francisco to reveal more or less the real-time locations of parking officers as they wrote tickets. Okay. So I made a website called Find My Parking Cops. It looks very similar to Apple's Find My Friends.

Yeah. And, yeah, you could see where the cops were as I travel. around SF. Take me a level deeper on the technical. What inspired this? Oh yeah. Did you get a lot of tickets? Is that what inspired this? I actually don't even have a car. My roommates, all my friends have cars and yeah, you hear a lot about tickets. It's pretty notorious in the city. Yeah. Yeah, take me through one layer deeper of the technical side. Is this just a function of the SF parking ticket office integrating with some sort of, you know, IT or ERP system that basically, as soon as the ticket's written, it gets loaded into a database. And then is that, is there public API? Is this stuff that you

can just look up on the, on like an actual website? Are you finding like an entirely private API? Yeah, it's all, it's all public. The magic is, um, right when they write the ticket, it goes up online and, you know, you have to enter the ID number to be able to see the ticket. Like there's a website, you can, you can pay your ticket. And when you pay it, you can see a copy of the ticket. So I figured out that the ID numbers for all the tickets were predictable, meaning that there's a, there's a pattern to it. So I could, I do kind of the pattern and I could see, okay, like this ticket to simplify it a lot. Like if like ticket number like 83 was just written, I know 84 is going to be next. So I just keep checking for the next one. There's a little

more technical than that, but like, you know, it's, it's pretty magical when predictable IDs are a thing. Like there's so many cool ideas. You can, you can scrape knowing that. So talk to me about your actual workflow is there are using vibe coding tools is well before that what was the what's the current state of things yeah sf obviously oh yeah uh you could potentially really you know uh if enough people in sf started using this it would be could i would hope that the mayor would write you a letter of of recommendation for this like you should win a medal yeah yeah you should this is this is the highest call yeah you should get the key to the city for this but what's the actual response from s f been if anything.

Yeah, so I do websites like these that are provocative a lot. And I think a lot about framing it and like how I want to present it to people. So I thought this would be maybe a little like mildly viral among people in SF, but it actually went pretty viral like around the world yesterday. Within four hours, the SF government mobilized and they changed their site to prevent me from getting the data. Like only four hours, it's like for them to prevent me from make the site useless. So yeah, the site is not up anymore because they changed the way that data.

Those four sweet hours. So we're... Everyone is free of parking tickets. It actually is, if it had gone less viral and not, and people hadn't, you know, if they hadn't noticed so quickly, I can imagine this being highly, somebody's pulling up, they want to grab a coffee, you know, they're like, they just check the map. They can run in and out. It's not a, not a, not a, I can see it actually being pretty valuable.

Yeah. Walk me through some of like the, how you like to build these projects, how you like to host them, what problems you typically run through? We'd love to know just a little bit about your stack these days. Yeah, I mean, use AI a lot. It makes things so much faster. I have, like, a gazillion ideas. These are all thinking notes for different, like, data ideas I want to make.

So just kind of, we can all try to knock one off in my first time. You guys talked about, you saw the other one I made Panama Playlists. Oh, yeah. Oh, you did that. You did that. We're on that. You scrape my data. I'm glad you're, I was wondering, like, how did I make the cut on

this like these are some big people on on there uh yeah what was the secret to that because it only was there any was there any strange fallout i mean it's hilarious to read into people's music taste i don't you you wouldn't have noticed this but my that the playlist that i had public that you featured was like seven songs i found that had like obscure references to venture capital so when i saw it i was like i don't listen to any of it when did i make this playlist i I didn't listen to entities. In like 2021, I had just started collecting or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. It was just kind of trying to highlight like how much data is out there on Spotify and like people just forget about it. And yeah, sorry you guys were part of it. No, it's fine. I thought it was hilarious. I think it was it was pretty amusing. I think a lot of people had a kick looking at it.

Yeah, what was the reaction from either the people that were in it or Spotify directly? Has there been a change to the API or because we saw this even during the last election like the Venmo public. records, people forget about this stuff all the time. There's kind of a question about how tech platforms deal with like default privacy because there was an era when everything was public and then people started closing things down becoming a little bit more private, but it's a, it's an interesting like user design problem for the big companies to shift. Yeah. In case your audience can see it, I scrape like the public playlist and listening data of notable figures on Spotify. Like they're like you guys were on it, like Sam Alton was on a bunch of politicians like Mike Johnson and JD Vance and like so many people just have stuff

open on there they haven't changed stuff yet I feel like Spotify probably will change like the default behavior of playlist because right now they're public by default which is kind of crazy but yeah I mean it was a lot of people took their playlist down kind of was a yeah interesting to see like kind of a lot of people embrace like Palmer Lucky he was like yeah these are my songs and I love them yeah it's great so did you have to get some sort of code or was did you just literally just search my profile and then it was there yeah for you guys a lot of it was just like real name to search your game and then yeah like found a profile with your picture and like probably like I can see like you guys follow each other or something

probably yeah yeah yeah uh what's gonna see some of some of the other uh stuff you've done recently uh and then I want to talk about uh yeah specifically what's the most underrated project or most underappreciated project you've worked on where you love it. It's one of your dearest children, but you feel like it hasn't gotten enough love. One, like, interesting one a few months ago, this was also very out much out there,

but you guys know it looks maxing. I mean, it's like a looks mapping, where I scraped the Google Maps reviews of restaurants in New York, SF, and L.A. And then I ran the profile pictures of the reviewers through a very jank attracting this model. And then I mean an aggregate map of like all these restaurants. It's like, okay, this restaurant is usually composed of like sixes or whatever out of ten.

Very off on the idea and premise, but it was kind of funny. That would make anybody mad. Yeah, you can you can glean a lot of just information because I also had an age map. You could, you know, get their age from the poll picture roughly and gendered too. So you can see what restaurants had like the most men or women. in a city. Did it, what kind of pattern, like, how much did it track with just the general hype around restaurants?

Like, what did you notice? Yeah, I mean, like, the oldest restaurant in SF, it's not a country club. Like, the most, like, male restaurant as a gay bar, the most female ones, like a brunch spot. Like, it all kind of fits when you look at it. It's predictable. That feels like a product that maybe it needs a little polish, but could just be something that would actually add value to the Google Maps experience.

Has big tech companies reached out to you and said, hey, come work for us? Not for that. There's been a couple, like, smaller maps startups that are like, oh, you should maybe add this. I think they should. Yeah, I think this would be cool to. I feel like it's too closely risky for Google,

but like definitely a smaller startup could do it. It'd be useful. Yeah, I feel like even if you dialed back some of the framing on what you're building, like there's product insight there, and there's like novel features that would surprise and delight. and I feel like that's kind of what a lot of these projects put on display. What were you doing before all these experiments? Does this pay the bills?

Do you have a full-time job? I have a full-time job doing like data stuff. That's more commercially reliable. I also, I mean, like you guys talked to Gabe Whaley of Mischiff. Yeah. There was an intern there. There you go. Mafia.

Which was like very, I mean, you guys can kind of see like all this is very inspirational. very inspired by mischief yeah yeah the chat is literally saying he's like mischief for tech projects l-o-l like people have clocked it for sure at first hand i got to see up close how they operate they're like incredible people yeah so you're at mischief and you said i need to pursue data science yeah that was my calling i think data's like really cool and it's cool that you can combine it with like mischief elements to make like weird things like this park what are let's let's uh i don't i don't it feels like you could talk through some ideas you have without giving away too much alpha just because a lot of i don't know if i doubt people would would steal your ideas

since a lot of them are like don't make uh are you not doing this to make money but uh you want to talk through any workshop any with us yeah let me see uh oh yeah what you got on the board i it's like one like terrible idea that i'll probably never build because it's awful is um there's a um open i has like a um api endpoint for like how um like a moderation end point for how bad a piece of text is it will like return back like a string of like you know is this um harassment or is this like racism or whatever yeah the horrible idea is like somebody should make a leaderboard um where you like after type in a string of text and you want to like actually hit every single one of these categories say the most offensive as possible you have to create the most offensive

string of text in history and as few cases as possible yeah and as many people as possible yeah horrible but horrible but you might not need to disclose what it was actually said you could have it be anonymous but yeah you it would certainly spark creativity I mean Rune was talking about this how there are certain strings of text that just go viral every time they're posted no matter when they're posted no matter who posts them these little insights we did this project banger archive where we took the best posts by certain people just screenshot of them and just said banger and they would get another 10,000 like every time yeah we had posts that would get 50 you know in order of magnitude more likes than the

original post and it was like a Naval post about like you should work like a lion like you know take rest and then work really hard and it's just like these universal truths that like just continue to deliver value what else what else you got what else you got what else is on the board give us some other stuff because I feel like 4chan would like one shot your leader they'd figure out there's like there's four words you put these together and make every person on earth mad yeah no it'd be terrible um one idea this is something I asked you with parking tickets here um I also found out that like vandalism citations have like a similar setup in the city so I was able to scrape like half a million pictures

of graffiti that cops took oh interesting I think it'd be cool to make up to that shows graffiti art through the lens of a of a cop in San Francisco yeah they took on their phone themselves. Yeah. It feels like a lot of your projects touch on public works projects, public, like cities, like data in cities. And I'm wondering if you have a view on like should cities be more open to the hacker culture, actually embrace some of this stuff. Like some of the stuff that you're building is like very close to just like a tool that would make life in a particular city easier and yet cities are notorious for long lines of the DMV and and not being the most tech forward organizations or entities. How do you think about actually like how cities deliver

tech services? Yeah, I think there's a lot there. I think the asset government actually has a pretty good handle on this. They have lots of data sets that they publish pretty frequently and there's a lot to work with there. Like they published like 911 calls with like a 10 minute delay. You can see kind of like an anonymized set of what people are calling 911 for, which is kind of cool. Like there's lots of things like that nobody really knows about, but there's things there. Would you like in a perfect world, in a perfect world, would one of these you do it for fun and then and then you discover some like enduring business or do you like just doing one idea after the next? Yeah, I mean, all these ideas are just things I find interesting to myself and you know usually that means something else will find

interesting too if I post online I think you're just like an outlet to be creative and it's nice to have distinct like work work and like this is more fun work but yeah now definitely it would be cool if something like that happened any any ideas are you are you capital constrained on anything like if you had 25 grand you would you would do because I feel like at this point there's enough people ourselves included we would we would uh as long as it was not uh uh offensive we would happily chip in to make possible there is yes i i need 33k for a project next may for a very fun stunt in san francisco okay if anyone like to we should tell me yeah all right let's talk we don't want to we don't know a spoil last story i want to talk about i i didn't really i didn't

put it together until just now that you're the person behind new york's hottest steakhouse that was fake tell me that story because i remember it happening and i didn't didn't put it together until just now. You talked to my co-conspirate in Buran, the archaeology guy. Yeah. Oh, no way. Yeah. No, that was an incredible, like one of the best nights of my life.

We had so many things go wrong, but like somehow it just happened to go right. We, a long story or short, we lived in a house together in New York. Moran made steaks. And then we made a Google Maps listing called Moran Steakhouse. And then all our friends started writing these bizarre five-star reviews. Like, you know, I converted out of like Hinduism so that way I could try something as beef for like he came in like drenched in blood from upstate fresh with a fresh cow like like really bizarre views of people in new york thought it was real because the dining

culture there is crazy yeah and we had this huge wait list over a couple years that we built up so we actually opened it for one night we opened a real restaurant fully permitted i was like licensed by the government to actually open a restaurant um we had 120 guests come thinking it was real it was like humongous operation legit sexual eyes but it somehow ended up well we did not get sued how did the guests how did the guests take it yeah what were the No point did they realize it was a joke? Most of them were pretty good. Like, I don't think people really realized it was fake.

We wanted people to find out it was fake in the Times, and they read it about the article. And a lot of people did they thought it was kind of a weird restaurant, but they thought it was like, okay, this is just how things are. It's like cool and avant-garde, right? It's like edgy, new and different and pop-up. Did you guys break even on it? Like, did you end up, did you sell enough steak to?

No, no. We spent like 16K and then made like 13K. So we lost like 3K. But for the amount of it got, like it was, it was viral everywhere. But that New York Times piece is forever. It is. Yes. Yeah.

Amazing. All right. Well, we will message you. We'll figure out how to make this. We'd love to talk about SF stunt. That'd be fantastic. And keep up the great work. Fantastic.

We'll talk to you soon, Riley. Thanks for joining. Cheers. Let me tell you about customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI-Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started. Opening AI says, More Compute in the Making announcing five new Stargate sites with Oracle and SoftBank,

putting us ahead of schedule on the 10 gigawatt commitment we announced in January. Let's go. Ahead of schedule. Massive. Stripes also buying back shares from its VC backers at $106.7 billion dollar valuation. Sequoia bought 861 million worth of shares in 2024 at a 70 billion valuation, so they're getting a markup. And amend and pretence his lives shot of a swath right now. He's talking about a swath demodron, who is obsessed with valuation, specifically liquidity premiums, illiquidity premiums.

And it's just interesting that Stripe continues to find ways to stay private, basically forever. and they've been on a tear the Collison brothers we saw this we talked to Joe Lonsdale about being in the same fraternity at Stanford with Gary Tan and you can zoom in on this photo

and see a young Joe Lonsdale and a young Gary Tan hanging out at Stanford back in 2003 pretty remarkable piece of tech lore I want to know what is everyone else up to we got to go through this list

because there's probably some interesting folks in here. I want to know what Michael Calhoun's up to, or Justin Reynolds, or Adam Rodriguez. Got to figure it out. A bunch of lads. Got to get on public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. And we got anything else here?

Tyler Cowan is talking about the potential for stagflation, economic stagnation. No one wants that. Tyler says it seems increasingly likely that the American economy is sleepwalking towards stagflation. In case you're wondering, that is not a good thing. Stagflation means an economy experiences excess inflation and excess unemployment at the same time. This was one thought to be impossible, but the OPEC oil price shocks of the 1970s triggered both high inflation and high unemployment, and voila, we were suddenly, we suddenly had a new

unhappy economic phenomenon. If I had to guess, I think there's a decent chance that 18 months from now, America could well have an inflation rate of 4% up from last year's 2.5%. Oh, John, we got some breaking news in the chat. What do we have? China agrees to terms of a U.S. TikTok deal. Wow. Thank you, Bobby Cosbank for breaking the news.

Thank you, hello, hello. Thank you everyone in the chat for keeping us up to speed. Is this not a little worrisome that they're agreeing with? You know, it seemed to have pretty historically had a pretty hard line. Well, pull up any more information while I tell you, about ad quick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to eggs of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines

technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I want to tell you how Steven Spielberg works. He says, Stephen Spielberg says, before he goes off to direct a movie, he always looks at four films. Can you guess what films he

watches before he goes out and directs a film? Seven samurai. Lawrence of Arabia. Borat. Borat. Dark night? Dark night. What's the other?

Mountain Head and office space. Off the movies you've seen? No. No. Now he does. Seven samurai. Lawrence of Arabia. It's a wonderful life and the searchers.

Have you seen any of those? Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia is a fantastic movie. Tyler, have you seen any of those? I've seen all of them but the searcher. Same with me. No, I have seen the searchers.

You need to give us a review on that. I need to check that out this weekend. I've seen seven. All right, since you've seen it, Name every scene. Yes. Is there a tech equivalent of this? Before you start a new company, study the grades.

Listen to these four founders' podcast episodes. Who are you listening to? Pick four. Top four. I'm going, Edward Land, Steve Jobs, Gaston Glock, and probably Rockefeller. You got to throw Gaston Glock in there for sure. Underrated.

And the chicken finger dream. You got to get up to see. speed on the chicken finger dream before you start your next company. I think every founder should have four founders podcast episodes in the chamber before they go out to raise, pump up speeches. Or if they need to run through a brick wall. Yeah, if you need to run through a brick wall, that you need to have your top four founders podcasts, ready to go. So when you hit the road, when you check into the Rosewood for your Sandhill tour of pitches, you're ready to go. And you're also wearing a fantastic timepiece on your wrist that you picked up from getbezzle.com

because your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. In other news, Palmer Lucky says that Mod Retro has teamed up with Ubisoft to re-release some of their greatest classics, starting with Rayman. It has some of the best graphics of any Game Boy Color title. Late Cycle developers truly mastered the hardware. It shipped months after the Game Away Advance was announced. So congrats to Palmer Lucky and a new deal for Mod Retro.

Company's been on a tear. Very excited. Pomer Lucky also hit the timeline yesterday, quoting a meta post. that see how U.S. national security agencies are using metathlama models to develop bespoke tools for America's military and intelligence professionals. It is crazy how much the vibe has shifted. Entirely.

Would imagine if meta posted something like that in... 2016, when Palmer was there for a couple months? Yeah. It would have been crazy. Palmer says added to the quote from the announcement, we're also supporting U.S. national security through our work, developing augmented in virtual reality technologies through our partnership with Anderil.

We are developing a range of wearable products to help maintain America's technological edge. You know what I've missed recently? Singing. There hasn't been enough singing on this show, so we've got to bring it back. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book of Wander with Inspiring Views, Hotel Great Amenities, Dreamy Veds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. We got to get Tyler to chime in when we're singing. We can close on this post. Vinnie Daniel says, parallels between NVIDIA and the Medici bank failure of the 1490s.

Who isn't? People are having fun drawing comparisons. Lots to the dot-com boom. Not so much to the 1490s, but fire up, crack open a history book. Should we do a deep dive on the 1490s? For sure. We should definitely read about the Medici bank failure. Tyler, you in?

Get out the red string. I was going to say, I see a parallel between NVIDIA and the rise of the Roman Empire early on. Okay. Okay. Taking over everything. Okay. Who is Jensen? Is he Caesar?

Or the rise of Genghis Khan, the Mongols. Maybe, maybe. Maybe. Anyways, that's a fun show, folks. Thanks for tuning in. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. We'll be back tomorrow, and I cannot wait. We will talk to you soon.

Cheers. Goodbye.